Picnic, Lightning is a collection of poetry by Billy Collins, published in 1998. His fourth book of poetry, it was his first to be widely published (selling over 50,000 copies) and his last before election as United States Poet Laureate.The title poem is a reference to Humbert Humbert's mundane description of his mother's death as described by him in the second chapter of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. "My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three...."