said that nobody can fully understand the meaning of love unless they've had a dog.

Billy Collins agrees. The former U.S. poet laureate is a literary lion of the New York Public Library

and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He recently released his 12th volume of poetry called Dog Show.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown spent time in New York

City with Collins and with dogs to explore this enduring relationship and how Collins translates

it to the page. It's part of our arts and culture series, Candace.

There's one. Hey, buddy. Hey, what's going on? Billy Collins, a dog lover and owner who's been writing about them for decades. He's now pulled together a selection of those poems in a volume he's dedicated to 85 dogs. Those are friends as well as his own. Watercolor illustrations by Pamela Steybel helped show what's beguiled Collins

ever since he got his first dog as an only child. All right, so you like this dog's life?

I do. Yeah, yeah. Yeah? Times like to be out. When I'm writing, I'm part dog. When you're writing,

you are part dog. We talked recently in New York at the American Kennel Club Museum of the Dog about why dogs have been such a compelling topic for him.

If you write long enough, you discover these obsessions that you might not have been aware of.

Did it look like an obsession?

Well, it didn't until I raked them together until I went through all my poems and picked

out the dog poems.

Then it seemed like, wow, that's a lot of dogs for one person.

The young Collins only got a dog of his own after much cajoling of his parents.

And his father's reaction has stuck with him.

When we got a dog from the pound, my father said, we're going to get a dog.

But remember, we're buying a heartache, which was the dog's going to die before we will,

which is a fact of dog and human life.

Somebody said, the only dogs are are flawless except they die too soon.

And this became a kind of theme in some of the poems, right?

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