TEHRAN – The Persian translation of the poetry book “Horoscopes for the Dead” by Billy Collins has been released in the bookstores across Iran.

Saeid Saeidpur has translated the poems from English into Persian and Morvarid Publication has brought out the book, ISNA reported.

Billy Collins is widely acknowledged as a prominent player at the table of modern American poetry. In this collection, the verbal gifts that earned him the title “America’s most popular poet” are on full display. 

The poems in “Horoscopes for the Dead” cover the usual but everlasting themes of love and loss, life and death, youth and aging, and solitude and union. With simple diction and effortless turns of phrase, Collins is at once ironic and elegiac.

Smart, lyrical, and not afraid to be funny, the poems extend Collins’s reputation as a poet who occupies a special place in the consciousness of readers of poetry, including the many he has converted to the genre.

Billy Collins, 85, is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. 

Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.

SS/SAB