tvö skáld

Billy Collins is truly great.

Instantly I know my choice of words is wrong. I will try again.

Seamus Heaney is truly great. Billy Collins is wonderful.

These are two of my favorite poets.

Heaney delivers poems of such pleasing proportion and startling weight, like surf-smoothed stones that prove heavier than you thought they would. Once taking them in hand, you stop and marvel at their matte smoothness and their heft. You experience a kind of vertigo by proxy, as when you are seized with the strange urge to fling not yourself but a valuable object, a dear-won ring of rosy gold, perhaps, far out across the water. You can see it in your mind's eye skipping five, six, seven times on the glittering surface before disappearing forever with same the sound that a bottle of port makes upon the first drawing-out of the thick, stained cork. The muscles of your arm tingle with this desire, but you know you will not hurl that thing, whatever it is (what is it? it is blurry when you look directly at it, like in dream). You will carry this heavy thing in an inside pocket always, feeling its weight, sometimes hearing it knock against something else - a coin, a pencil, maybe your heart - as you move and breathe.

Billy Collins is a whole other thing. He is wonderful; his poems evoke wonder. They are light where Heaney's are weighty. They make you look upward in expectation of seeing something flying at your head, not in attack, but in a feathery acrobatic way that will make you gasp and then laugh. I do not mean to say that they are easy, Collins's poems, or frivolous. But they swoop upwards at the end and take you with them. Some of them are like airships sailing by overhead, dragging lines behind them; as you turn to watch their passage, the fluke of the trailing anchor catches under your ribcage and jerks you up into the air.