Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, has been hailed as the first American poet since Robert Frost to garner great critical acclaim and broad popular appeal in equal measure. "His poems generate surprise, inviting the reader to anticipate each new one as if it might be the best one yet" (World Literature Today). In Collins’s poetry, "even the most commonplace things never turn out quite the way you think they will" (Newsweek). 

 

The Billy Collins Suite comprises intimate chamber settings for eleven Collins poems, some sung, others narrated. The album includes Pierre Jalbert’s jazzy, other-worldly take on "The Invention of the Saxophone"; Stacy Garrop’s Ars Poetica, a four-song cycle ranging from a jaunty “Sonnet” to the heartbreaking “Endangered”; Vivian Fung’s Collins trilogy of vivid miniature comedy-dramas marked by especially effective use of the clarinet; Lita Grier’s poignant "Forgetfulness" and nostalgic "Dancing Towards Bethlehem"; and Zhou Tian’s "Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems . . ." in which flute, viola, and harp evoke Far Eastern imagery.

 

Artists include Chicago Lyric and San Francisco Opera mezzo-soprano Buffy Baggott, rising young baritone Jonathan Beyer, Chicago Symphony Orchestra Acting Principal Clarinet John Bruce Yeh, flutist Tim Munro of eighth blackbird, saxophonist Susan Cook, the Lincoln Trio, harpist Nuiko Wadden, pianists Yoko Yamada-Selvaggio and John Goodwin, and narrator Steve Robinson of WFMT Radio.

 

The project was conceived and commissioned by Chicago’s innovative Music in the Loft chamber series, "one of the most unique springboards for young instrumentalists, singers and composers in the nation" (Chicago Tribune).