After the Carnival
Publication Date: March 2025
You could do worse than to judge this book by its cover. Goya’s painting depicts a traditional Spanish ceremony at the end of the carnival. His revelers have had their fill, and more. The crowd is beginning to turn, in the sense of “going bad.” Their merriment has become histrionic, the grin on the banner they wave conveys malevolence. The demons among them may or may not be men in costume, and anyway, the eyes of everyone else are equally as black and empty.
Goya’s vision resonates with the darker poems in After the Carnival, of which there are many. All of the ballads end in either physical or moral catastrophe. One in particular, “The Pastime,” is narrated from a nihilist’s perspective. Apart from the ballads, there’s “The Man in the Middle,” torn limb from limb, whom you can easily imagine buried under the tumult of Goya’s bacchanal. Add to that the awful descent into madness in “Tell You the Story,” the realization of the utter contingency of things in “The Surface,” the drunken clown in “Merry-Go-Round,” the terrible reasoning in “Addendum” and “An Indelicate Proposal,” the casual invitation to contemplate a holocaust in “Nuclear Option”… This collection has a lot of darkness in it. A reader would do well to be on the alert for shadows even in the lighter poems: “Don’t think that it’ll be a lark / because you’ve always loved the dark.”
Yet there is good here, and the passages of faith and clarity are all the brighter for being set in a wood so darkly obscure. “The Path” that “takes you back to where you are” is of first importance. Father McLaughlin’s faithful “three words” serve as a North Star. God himself shares the Canuck’s desire to remember what has come before, etching his notes on the rocks along the St. Lawrence. The common birds celebrate their differences in a song of Creation, “Altogether Alive.” A married couple laugh on the ride home from the doctor’s office, giddy with relief. Two poets look back together at their earliest connection to language, asking, “What book felt like/ first love to you?” And, in the night, the “thin wafer” of a gibbous moon sends down a continuum of metaphor, redeeming the imperfection of the world with its “wholly insufficient bread.”
A giant of contemporary metrical poetry, Alfred Nicol is also a virtuoso of irony. After paying good money for a seaside vacation, tourists grow restless and clamor to help a fishing crew. The best-dressed man on a bus is a former death-row inmate skipping parole. If God is dead, everything is rendered unto Caesar. A bear knows every secret but cannot speak. The irony is never played for laughs, though there are plenty, and at least as many tears. An early poem announces a dichotomy between what’s welcoming and what’s sublime, and indeed the ironic turns throughout After the Carnival have a sublime core. I was bowled over by the emotional power of these poems, by how much they gave voice to what I had always known but had not necessarily acknowledged about being human. Bonus points if you notice the subtle literary references peppering this musical, energizing collection! —Anton Yakovlev, author of One Night We Will No Longer Bear the Ocean
If you often approach poetry with skepticism, let down your guard. Alfred Nicol is the rare poet you can surrender to without reservation; you’re in superb hands. In his deceptively colloquial poems, Nicol’s wit creeps up on you and before you know it becomes philosophy (often with a religious theme). Masquerading as light verse, “Addendum” paints a secular age devoted to Caesar’s realm, leaving nothing on the balance sheet to render unto God. The title poem “After the Carnival” likewise alludes to the Gospel of Matthew: Nicol speculates, with a twist, on God’s solicitude for us and our own responsibility in turn—all this in seventeen syllables lodged stubbornly in my brain. “Ordinary Time” refers to the numbered weeks between the Christian holidays; here it describes a reprieve from terminal illness. The collection includes tragedies (like the haunting deaths of children); but—optimistic or the opposite—it’s Nicol’s brilliant jeux d’esprit that does the serious work. —Deborah Warren, author of Connoisseurs of Worms
Alfred Nicol’s After the Carnival will remind readers that Nicol is not only one of our best poets, but one of our very best storytellers and the contemporary master of the ballad. His language is gorgeous, his imagery striking, and his thinking deeply layered—in short, this is a book to be savored. —A. M. Juster, translator of Petrarch’s Canzoniere
The poems in Alfred Nicol’s After the Carnival are replete with felicities. The wealth of such moments bespeaks a virtuosity of the most virtuous, least show-offy sort. To take an example, a bald eagle atop a floodlight pole eyes a stadium “for small game, / unburdened by the emblematic weight / of victory and empire, wealth and fame, / and looking pretty regal just the same.” Nor are these poems merely the sum of their highlights: they’re beautifully architected, with all the resources of poetry—form, imagery, syntax, rhythm, meditative depth, narrative drive—repeatedly marshaled in the service of a telling point. Nicol is observant, humane, funny—and, as becomes apparent in the book’s climactic last section, a person of faith: a faith in which, like that of George Herbert, this non-believer couldn’t help but emotionally participate. I can’t recommend After the Carnival more highly. —Dan Brown, author of Subjects in Poetry
Alfred Nicol’s writing is remarkable both in its verse craft and its versatility. Often set in Canada or coastal New England, his finely etched lyrics and his sometimes harrowing narratives may recall forebears such as Frost and Robinson. But Nicol’s voice and vision are his own, assets of an imagination ready to explore the full range of human feelings, from laughter to tears with all the equivocal ones in between. His energetic diction, often dexterously rhymed, memorably conveys what his sharply observant eyes have taken in. Finely attentive to its persons and places, After the Carnival is a book that will be read with delight—and returned to, with renewed wonder at so many things done so unassumingly well. —Robert B. Shaw, Emily Dickinson Professor of English Emeritus, Mount Holyoke College
In one of the final poems in After the Carnival, Alfred Nicol writes, “All music’s owed to love, that wakes the senses”. Love, along with the music love creates, permeates this remarkable collection, although the love exhibited can be tough, surprising, and even, at times, shocking. The poet’s eye for the precisely right detail is everywhere evident, whether in poems about Nature—as in his delightful sequence about birds, “Avatars of Appetite”—or those about human interactions, personal, social, and religious. The book abounds with good humor and wit (the title poem, “After the Carnival,” for instance, is a haiku, and “Wretched Rocco,” about a cat, is hilarious), but is also haunted by darkness, literal as well as existential: “A Notion” ends with “—I wonder, will the spirit absently / recall the flesh that housed it for a time?” “An Irreverent Portrait of Father McLaughlin” is a marvel! These are poems to return to and to treasure. —Bruce Bennett, author of Just Another Day in Just Our Town
In our age of detachment and ironic distance, Alfred Nicol isn’t afraid to engage the reader’s emotions in poems that range from warm-hearted to marrow-chilling. After the Carnival is unified by Nicol’s wit, his profound connection to place, and his mastery of poetic craft—but most of all by his empathy and willingness to take emotional risks. Whether examining the “emptiness in everything, / like the shade cradled in the crescent moon” or celebrating the survival of three ants in “a piece of kettle corn / the sparrow lets fall,” these poems dig deep, unearthing the sacred and sustaining in a seemingly indifferent universe. —April Lindner, author of This Bed Our Bodies Shaped
Reviews of After the Carnival
“A Review of After the Carnival“ – Steve Knepper at New Verse Review
“Alfred Nicol’s new collection demonstrates his prodigious metrical gifts,” by Shawn Philip Cooper, PhD., at The Catholic World Report
“Light on Their Feet,” an omnibus review by Barbara Loots at Light
Will Gualtiere reviews After the Carnival in America
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Order After the Carnival directly from Wiseblood Books.
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One Hundred Visions of War, by Julien Vocance, translated by Alfred Nicol, Preface by Dana Gioia
Publication Date: November 2022
The “One Hundred Visions of War” of Julien Vocance (1878-1954) comprise some of the first haiku written in the West. Where classical Japanese haiku traditionally speaks of the beauty of Nature, Vocance uses the form to a very different purpose, depicting the horror and brutality of armed conflict, as seen from the trenches during the first world war. Readers get a ground-level view of unimaginable slaughter. The value of Vocance’s poetry lies in its witness to the experience of the human being caught up in a battle which, as Wendell Berry put it, “the machines won.” Only imagine: an obscure soldier-poet pits his human art against overwhelming military technology, and his art survives.
Like Ungaretti and Apollinaire, Julien Vocance faced the instant karma of the First World War with outcries of visionary perception. Each flash of the battlefield, each haiku, is a compelling ode to what can go away in a second, and to what remains, even amid annihilation. One Hundred Visions of War is an essential addition to the history of modernist poetry. More importantly, it is an urgent and deeply moving read, each vision guided into English by the poet Alfred Nicol, who brings a keen eye, an exacting ear, and a consummate poetic intelligence to these pages.—Joseph Donahue, Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University; author of the ongoing poem Terra Lucida
Don’t miss reading Julien Vocance’s “One Hundred Visions of War,” marvelously translated by Alfred Nicol. Drawing from the brevity of traditional Japanese haiku, Vocance’s fascinating French hai-kai bear witness to the horrors of war in bursts of image and sensation. The trenches of WWI materialize on the page by way of language both fresh and timeless. —Kirun Kapur, Editor of Beloit Poetry Journal; author of Women in the Waiting Room
When I learned that the French poet Julien Vocance chose to write his One Hundred Visions of War in—of all things!—haiku, I wondered why: how could that most fleeting, elusive, and subtle of forms deal with a theme as dense, brutal, and unsubtle as the horror that is war? Well, I’ve just read—and reread, nonstop—Alfred Nicol’s brilliant translation of the French original, and the only thing I’m wondering now is how I managed to undervalue so completely what imagination, speed, daring imagery, black humor and an uncanny gift for language can do to convey the unspeakable perfectly. —Rhina P. Espaillat, 2021 Recipient of the NEPC Golden Rose Award; author of And After All
Holy shit. —Joshua Mehigan, Author of Accepting the Disaster, a New York Times Book Review best book of the year
Reviews of One Hundred Visions of War
“In the Light of Rocket Flares” – Maryann Corbett at The Friday Poem
“The Vacant Eye” – J. C. Scharl at The New Criterion
“Beloved Communities, Lasting Divisions: Poets on Country, Culture and Kinship,” by Ned Balbo, writing for Literary Matters.
“A Review of One Hundred Visions of War by Julien Vocance,” by Ann Spiers – North American Review
“The Lies and Truths of War,” by Carl Little at Maine Arts Journal
“Julien Vocance: One Hundred Visions of War (translated from the French by Alfred Nicol), reviewed by Miriam O’Neil” – Červená Barva Press Newsletter
“What Can Be Learned from Reading Julien Vocance’s One Hundred Visions of War?” by John Zheng – Valley Voices
“A collection of World War I haiku, translated from the French,” by Nina MacLaughlin in The Boston Sunday Globe “New England Literary News”
Paul Miller includes mention of One Hundred Visions of War in the “Briefly Noted” section of Modern Haiku, Vol. 54:1, Winter, 2023.
“One Hundred Visions of War: Haiku in No Man’s Land” – Jim Kates at The Arts Fuse
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Brief Accident of Light
Publication Date: September 2019
Brief Accident of Light is a collection of twenty poems, ten by Rhina P. Espaillat and ten by Alfred Nicol. The poems were written for an arts collaboration initiated by Newburyport Chamber Music Festival Director David Yang. Mr. Yang, a distinguished violist and composer, made a list of emblematic locations in and around the city of Newburyport, and assigned to each location a specific time of day or night. He first commissioned composer Robert Bradshaw to write a new piece for string quartet drawing its inpiration from those locations. Mr. Yang then invited Espaillat and Nicol to visit each spot at the specified time and to give voice to their experiences in a series of poems. Because the poets chose to make their visits together, most of the poems gathered here are paired —a reader will hear two voices emanating from each place, as when two birds perch in the same tree.
The two poets found themselves a little taken aback by the way these poems seemed to write themselves. One can only surmise that the spirits of City Hall and Oak Hill Cemetery really had something they needed to express, and were only waiting for an opportunity! A poet can get carried away when that kind of thing happens. You’ll see that there are four unpaired poems in this collection—“Waking Up,” “Fly-By: The Newburyport Art Association,” “The Closing Year,” and “Fog at Night”—each resulting from one or the other poet writing from a place not mentioned on the original list.
In keeping with the collaborative nature of this project, Kate Sullivan was invited to illustrate the collection with images of the sites mentioned in the poems. She too got caught up in the spirit of Mr. Yang’s vision, and contributed the celebratory ink-wash sketches the reader will happen upon, turning these pages.
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Animal Psalms
Publication Date: June 2016
Alfred Nicol’s Animal Psalms begins with the baseball field’s organized uncertainties, and continues on many a trajectory of animal ruminations―with the human species well accounted for―ending in the imbalance of the everyday “Nuts” around us. The subjects include the elephant, snake, sheep, skunk, bee, couple dynamics, the trials and triumphs of the ruler or the everyman. This is a collection rich in aphorisms on the bright and shady spectra of our interactions. Recognizable soliloquies with the meditative self or dialogues with the beloved are unraveled for keen insights on the human condition―deconstructing them until the knotty connecting threads are exposed. Nicol gives us a mature collection of quiet reflection, with wit and wisdom deployed through finely crafted poems of masterly formal dexterity.
2018 Massachusetts Book Awards listed Animal Psalms as a “Poetry Must Read”
Dear reader, I’ve fallen in love with this book, and that will happen to you too. Read, for instance, the very last poem, “Nuts,” and read the great “How to Ignore an Invisible Man,” and you’re hooked forever. Read all the rest, these poems which have our numbers, and have his own too, that tell about our lives, and his, and the lives of snakes, and bees, and elephants, with such humor, and pity, and praise, for all of us, human and animal, in our situations. It’s impossible not to fall in love. The poet Rhina Espaillat has it just right when she says,”He uses language with a grace so effortless that it creates the illusion of having arranged itself, by itself. — David Ferry, author of Bewilderment, winner of the 2012 National Book Award
As the title Animal Psalms suggests, there is reverence here – a reverence that derives less from religion than from a religious attention to the things of the world, from baseball games to zoo elephants to the newly beloved. Nicol is a melodic writer, called first to the music of words, to “speech that lets the sound / carry the greater part of what is said.” He’s also a poet whose images you won’t soon forget. They summon the real world and simultaneously render it other-worldly. In “A Game in Late August,” as the home team fails to pull itself together, one disheartened fan notices a cloud stuck in the sky “like gauze over a cut.” Soon “the game looks more like work; the boys, like men.”
While the poems offer moments of ecstatic escape, they’re more often held in check by an Augustan wit, ironic humor and a touch of Baudelaire. “Youth is a cosmetic for the skull,” concludes one quatrain in “Against Beauty;” another poem, “Le Vieux Gets the Best of His Better Sense,” begins, “She warmed to me; I’ll live another day.” Poise and wit prevail in these psalms; they give us both despair inflected by light and illumination held fast by darkness. — Erica Funkhouser, author of Earthly
If we would only take the time to let one of Alfred Nicol’s poems sink in through the brilliant latticed grid of its formal exterior, how the truth of what he has to say about the human condition would hit us the way a line drive whips toward you on a dreamy summer’s afternoon, startling you back into the electric now. I love these poems because they evoke for me the zany, spiritual energy of the Beats welded as only a workman can work unwieldy things to the tempered grid of six centuries of formalism. Don’t be surprised if—after reading these poems—you find them turning back to their true subject, dear reader, which turns out to be none other than you. —Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey
Animal Psalms goes to some dark places, yes, but the steadiness of Nicol’s hand on the tiller both formally and thematically makes you eager for the trip. When he does come into the light (imagining Ichabod Crane at his high school reunion, for example) you will delight in the words and images while also seeing even these poems as part of his larger itinerary. —Barbara Egel (Read Barbara Egel’s review in Light Poetry Magazine)
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Elegy for Everyone
Publication Date: June 2010
Alfred Nicol’s second volume of poetry is a work of extraordinary musicality, comprising song-like lyrics (“The Mistress to Herself,” “The Gift”), pensive meditations in blank verse (“Bat,” “Elegy for Everyone”) —and even the comic ragtime of “Persnickety Ichabod’s Rhyming Diary,” a narrative written entirely in limericks. Noted poet and prosodist Tim Steele numbers Nicol among the “excellent younger poets working in and carrying on the metrical tradition.” Elegy for Everyone won the 2007-2008 Anita Dorn Memorial Award for Poetry.
When Alfred Nicol titled his collection of poems Elegy for Everyone, he suggested the reflective tone and thematic substance of his compilation. Its range of ideas and moods is staggering. In poem after poem the author provides a feast for the mind. The manuscript runs to seventy pages, not one of which is dull or trivial. Nicol has created a work of complex vision and stylistic mastery. If one reads his book with the empathy and imagination it deserves, one is unlikely to forget its inhabitants who are often shadows of ourselves. — Dr. Alfred Dorn
To purchase this book, please contact Alfred Nicol directly
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Winter Light
Publication Date: August 2004
Winter Light by Alfred Nicol, recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award, is a remarkable new collection of poems by a sure and steady hand in an astonishing variety of forms and voices. As Rhina Espaillat remarks, Winter Light contains a “flawless ballade, a sestina, sonnets, and nonce forms that make this book a delight to read. The syntax everywhere is unobtrusively elegant; the vocabulary fresh without self-consciousness; the imagery gorgeous, precise, and persuasive; and the rhymes surprising, unforced, and ‘right.'” Ranging from the quiet lyric to the pitch-perfect dramatic monologue, Nicol transforms ordinary experiences into intriguing meditations on time, memory, loss, and the magic one finds in daily life. Contributing to those meditations are the various characters that Nicol conjures: Cocteau’s Beast, a man who believes he wills the sun across the sky each day, a magician’s daughter, a tattooed couple, and even an ibis. Yet, as Espaillat points out, “under that surface stir unquiet questions, tensions, challenges to faith, startling confessional hints, troubled memories, the sense of love gone sour and hope betrayed: a view of life not entirely sunny or simple.” These are hard-earned poems, ones that question life and, ultimately, transform our vision.
It’s tempting to describe Alfred Nicol as a “poet’s poet,” because he uses language with a grace so effortless that it creates the illusion of having arranged itself, by itself. But Nicol is much more than a poet’s poet; he’s also a reader’s poet, and his work, though dazzling, is not intended to simply dazzle but to convey, with charm and profundity, the experiences of our common life. These are poems that seem to — but only seem to — reverse the famous Frost dictum: they end in the delight that the reader finds on the printed page, but clearly they begin in the wisdom that sees clearly all of what it sees, and is compelled by honesty to say so. — Rhina P. Espaillat
I met Alfred Nicol when we were both young, he as a poet, I as a teacher. Back then Mr. Nicol was keen on the Beats, and I had a poetic hero or two among that diverse clan myself. How different an aesthetic Nicol shows in the splendid Winter Light, as canny and moving a formalist collection as I’ve seen in years, in a league with the likes of R.S. Gwynn; yet how gratifying that this poet’s work loses none of its early fire. The energy of youth, the wisdom of maturity: what poet could long for a better combination, the one this terrific book epitomizes? — Sydney Lea
I have admired the poetry of Alfred Nicol for many years, and it was a deep pleasure to read Winter Light. In keeping with the title, poems in this collection burn with a cool radiance. Nicol is naturally drawn toward the affirming limits of formal poetry, but there is an uncanny freedom in this work — a willingness to take large emotional risk, writing about the most basic human emotions with an icy clarity. On every page Nicol exhibits a genuine largeness of spirit and grace of mind. His techniques are well-honed. This is certainly among the finest new volumes of poetry I have read in years. — Jay Parini
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Second Hand Second Mind — Dreams and Photographs by Alfred Nicol & Elise Nicol
Publication Date: December 2011
A collection of poems and photographs that sometimes pairs comedy with elegy, Second Hand Second Mind moves beyond observation and documentation to embark on a psychic journey that calls everyday truths into question while confronting the complexities of identity and loss.
This is the first collaboration between Alfred Nicol and his sister, the artist Elise Nicol.
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The Powow River Anthology
Edited by Alfred Nicol
Introduction by X. J. Kennedy
Publication Date: February 2006
The Powow River Anthology is a collection of poetry by 24 award-winning poets who are members of the prestigious Powow River Poets of Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Like an oasis in a desert, this anthology offers a fertile refuge in the largely arid landscape of contemporary verse. Here readers can escape the bewildering, coercive heat of Poetry with a capital “P” and find many refreshing and memorable individual poems. Hats off to the remarkable Powow poets: long may they write and thrive. —Timothy Steele
Having had some experience with the Powow River Poets, I was aware of just how good this anthology could turn out to be. It is that good. It’s not just that this group of people, as a whole and individually, is deeply talented. No. It’s that they seem to empower one another, to set standards for each other that every one of them is determined to achieve and amplify. And it’s not just that they can write, it’s that they can think as well. These poems are at once lucid and complex, thoughtful and full of emotion held in check, often by traditional craft: rhymes, meters, imagery, song. Truly, I believe that much has been lost in poetry since the rush to dump craftsmanship began in the 1950s, and the Powow River Poets are bringing it back with a flourish. —Lewis Turco
For a number of years, I and many others have marveled at the phenomenon represented by the Powow River Poets. Any writer is fortunate to be able to count on the good will and expertise of even a single fellow writer as a constantly constructive reader and critic. How fortunate then are the members of this gifted group, who have clearly benefited so much from their ongoing dynamic association. The support and inspiration derived from such creative collaboration is everywhere apparent in the Powow River Anthology. It is an exemplary collection. —Bruce Bennett
To purchase this book, please contact Alfred Nicol directly