Weekending With Billy Collins

I spent last weekend with Billy Collins. Not in person of
course.

Billy Collins is a poet. An american. The US Poet Laureate in fact. I
didn't know about Billy Collins until recently. I think it is entirely
Eddie Gibbons fault that I have heard of him now.

On Thursday you see I went to the local library reading group. I was
lured there by the promise of poetry but instead had to listen to a
discussion on a book that nobody liked. They are a querulous bunch at
that reading group. They like nothing better than carping about a book
they loathed. They were peevish about The Lighthouse Stevensons and I
quite enjoyed listening to them grumbling.

I managed to force them to listen to a poem. (Watching for Dolphins by
David Constantine) And I felt that feeling you feel when someone
doesn't immediately love something you love. It was a kind of early
National Poetry Day celebration. A couple of other people read poems
too. Then it came to the point where the next book was given out. Billy
Collins collection Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes. I could tell
the group were wryly amused at my enthusiasm. It felt like booty to me.
I was thrilled and after forcing a National Poetry Day bookmark into
each of their hands I skipped off into the night.

Which is how I came to be sitting on Leicester railway station
(platform three) on Friday evening reading Billy Collins. I was waiting
for the train to see the boyfriend. The platform sweeper came along
with his rubbish picker upper and his black plastic bag and I saw him
looking at the cover of the book. I wondered if he was taking in the
quote from Carol Ann Duffy. ("Billy Collins is one of my favourite
poets in the world" quoth she.) But it turned out he wasn't.

"Is that a fireplace?" the litter picker said, expertly tweezing up a
fag end which might have been mine and stowing it in his bag.

Slightly startled I turned the book over and looked.

"No, I think it's an aga," I said. He nodded in a disappointed but
stoic way and grappled under the bench for a disposable coffee cup. "Do
you like fireplaces?" I asked him. He beamed like it was the question
he had always been waiting for. He leant on his litter picking stick
like a farmer on a hoe. I watched his face become dreamy as he
recounted the story of a place in London, he couldn't quite remember
where but it was near Euston.

"A whole massive ROOM full of fireplaces," he sighed. "There must have
been 500 of them." He was lost for a short while in his reverie. Then
he said, "must be all these years working on boilers," and resumed his
litter picking.

Over a meal boyfriend and I fought over reading Billy Collins. I
insisted on reading some poems aloud. We snatched it out of each others
hands and pouted and gloated by turn. When we got back to the house I
hid Billy Collins under my jumper and tittered, though in the end I had
to confess.

Well I walked round Birmingham on Saturday with Billy Collins in the
back pocket of my jeans, wondering if he was a kind of talisman. The
sun shone but nothing else really happened.

I have never fought over a poetry book during a meal before. I think I
like it.