In addition to publishing collections of his own verse, award-winning poet Michael Collier has edited a number of anthologies. Collier brings together the work of more than eighty poets in The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry. The "quality" of the 1995 anthology is "as high as the range is broad," commended a Publishers Weekly critic, who believed that The Wesleyan Tradition is an unquestionably "good anthology." Collier then worked with Stanley Plumly to edit The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Collier, who became associated with the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 1992 and later became its director, is one of the anthology's eighty-two contributors. "[T]he editors were drawn to quiet works and chose to create a chamber music-like anthology," described Booklist's Donna Seaman, who praised the volume's "high-caliber work." A reviewer for Publishers Weekly also indicated that The New Bread Loaf Anthology contains many prominent authors who "deliver some virtuoso performances." However, the reviewer concluded that "the book reflects less of a 'commitment to the future of the nation's poetry,' as the editors profess, than a veneration for its glorious past." Graham Christian, writing in Library Journal, judged the anthology to be "perhaps the best single volume of contemporary poetry now available—a superb introduction."

The first collection of Collier's own poetry, The Clasp and Other Poems, appeared in 1986, and The Folded Heart appeared three years later. Objects, and the relationship between an object and its owner, are portrayed in The Neighbor, Collier's third book of poetry. As Collier told Contemporary Authors, objects are important: "I suppose . . . that I believe almost literally in Williams' notion of 'no ideas but in things.' I'm a consumer. I like things. I'm fascinated by the mechanical world. Although the virtual world doesn't yet have its hold on me, it contains all the necessary ingredients. But gears and levers and pulleys, I can't get enough of."

In The Neighbor Collier's poems "maintain their balance by honing in on things, usually things small or light enough to be held in one hand," commented James Longenbach in Yale Review. "Like Hardy, who could write a poem about anything, Collier can focus on almost any object—the most unassuming, improbable object—and spin a story out of it, unfold its significance in ways we would never have predicted." Noting the "understated darkness" of these poems, Longenbach added, "Collier's poems unearth a sinister and yet oddly comic cast of misfits, ogres, and giants," which Bruce Murphy also remarked about in his review for Poetry. Collier's poems "strive unapologetically for truth," observed Murphy, "[y]et there is also something surreal and garish about these snapshots. . . . The poems aren't weird, but the world they describe is." "Collier's descriptions seem edgeless and perfect, if not always passionate," analyzed Murphy, asserting that this is not always a strength. He contended that sometimes "the very sureness of the poet's grip on language, his fluency and ability to get it to show what he wants it [to] show, betrays the poem." Murphy concluded that we may "miss the handholds for the imagination offered when a poem allows words to open to their own complex associations instead of cauterizing them." Writing in the London Review of Books, John Redmond praised Collier's use of description in The Neighbor, stating, "simple, accurate description, with metaphorical resonance, is used to great effect. . . . In poem after poem, he selects just the right details to describe these men and what they do. Within three lines, for instance, we can see the tree-cutter in 'Brueghel.'" Judging the work to be a "fine collection," Redmond remarked that reading through The Neighbor, "one feels that one is learning something from each poem, to the point of feeling sorry when they end."

Youth, lies, siblings, and father-son relations are among the subjects in Collier's fourth volume of poetry, The Ledge, which garnered mixed reviews. In the Bloomsbury Review, Jeff Biggers judged the collection to be "compelling and exquisite" and compared Collier's poems favorably to those of Randall Jarrell. "Collier renders the intimacy and intensity of our lives into delicate, smooth, and at times unnerving lines of timelessness that blend myth and biblical touches with everyday experiences." On the other hand, Publishers Weekly reported that Collier's "ruminations . . . have their descriptive charms, but generally lack the dramatic urgency necessary to sustain the book as a whole." So too, Brian Henry of the New York Times Book Review was unimpressed with Collier's use of language and called the collection uneven. About his use of language, Collier told Contemporary Authors: "The music I'm most attuned to . . . is the one inherent in colloquial speech. I think one of the poet's jobs is to prove that the resources of colloquial speech are adequate to the demands of poetry. Another way of saying this is that we are by necessity training others—readers of poems, I presume—how to hear poetry in the bits and pieces of language everyone already uses, a language that Marianne Moore unabashedly characterized as 'plain American which cats and dogs can read!'" Booklist contributor Ray Olson praised Collier for the "emotionality" of the poems in The Ledge, which "is beautifully announced by the first poem in the book, 'Argos.'"