"Today I was awakened by strong coffee / and the awareness that the earth is busy with whales / even though we can't see any." Nature is on Billy Collins's mind in this collection of 50 poems, with odes to ducks, English roses, an Irish spider, and his beloved, aging dog. Mixing the playful and the serious, the former U.S. Poet Laureate also extols the pleasures of art and literature—from the music of saxophonist Hank Mobley to the paintings of Edward Hopper—while evoking such locales as Arizona, Hawaii, Paris, Ontario, and mid-20th-century Manhattan.