"Today"Read about the other entries on the list.
Billy Collins
Collins’s poem is a single sentence, like a sigh of pleasure. It begins: “If ever there were a spring day so perfect…” He imagines taking “a hammer to the glass paperweight / on the living-room end table / releasing the inhabitants / from their snow-covered cottage.” There is a delightful playfulness here – a sense of being, in spring, a mini-God within the kingdom of one’s own front room. Captive figures from the snow dome now venture out: “holding hands and squinting / into this larger dome of blue and white” as this witty, carefree poem completes what it started.
--Marshal Zeringue