Picnic, Lightning

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Picnic, Lightning is a collection of poetry by Billy Collins. His fourth book of poetry, it was his first to be widely published (selling over 50,000 copies)[1] and his last before election as Poet Laureate of the United States.

The title poem is a reference to Humbert Humbert's mundane description of his mother's death as described by him in the first chapter of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three."