A reviewer reviews a reviewer

British literary critic and poet Rory Waterman takes on one of the most—mean? hilarious?—well, distinctive voices in poetry reviewing today. We speak of the—terrifying? tantalizing?—William Logan. Here he is on poetry in general:

When poetry books arrive at my door […] I look at them as I can, somewhat lazily and haphazardly, and sometimes after ten or twenty pages I put one down with a sigh and turn to another—there are so many waiting and so few I can review. In truth, if a poet doesn’t catch your eye in twenty pages, he probably never will. Life is too short, and poetry books, however short, are too many.

And on Billy Collins in particular:

Yet readers adore Billy Collins, and it feels almost un-American not to like him. Try to explain to his readers what ‘The Steeple-Jack’ or ‘The River Merchant’s Wife’ or ‘The Snow Man’ is up to, and they’ll look at you as if you’d asked them to hand-pump a ship through the locks of the Panama Canal. Most contemporary poetry isn’t any more difficult to understand than Collins—it’s written in prose, good oaken American prose, and then chopped into lines.

After such analysis, Collins might feel chopped, too. But everyone else might be giggling.