Alfred Nicol’s new collection demonstrates his prodigious metrical gifts

Coming two decades after winning the Richard Wilbur Award, Alfred Nicol’s latest collection, After the Carnival, proves that its author has only continued to develop his prodigious metrical gifts.

In this, his fourth collection, he offers an honest and unflinching look at the challenges that arise in the course of lives ordinary and extraordinary alike. But as in the forlorn grounds of the carnival after the revelry has ended, there are shadows here: suffused across the poems in the work, sometimes explicit, sometimes lurking around the edges of the verse, there is a darkness that is always present and meaningful.

This darkness is particularly apparent in poems such as “The Man in the Middle,” which concludes with the speaker suggesting that the titular person should be torn asunder. Likewise, the title poem in the collection, “After the Carnival,” encapsulates the sense of the unseemly, attended by the hint of decay, in its three lines which read:

Alive! Three ants crawl
from a piece of kettle corn
the sparrow lets fall.

In this poem, the exclamation of “alive” (exaltation, or relief?), the cast-offs (ants and corn alike), the (deferred) threat of the ants being eaten, and the disturbing idea of human food covered in insects all work together to push back against any sort of comfortable image that might tentatively have been suggested by the opening word. This resistance includes the speaker’s observation that the ants have been saved from death in a bird’s gullet: “Alive!” indeed, but in imagery that summons up wastage and the merciless consumption of nature.

The thirty-three poems in After the Carnival are exercises in the shorter poetical forms, on the whole: some run to just a few lines, while the longest are several pages in length. These poems are divided into six, roughly equal sections, with the third section, “Avatars of Appetite,” comprising a single poem divided into numbered and titled stanzas.

For the purposes of concision, this review will consider as respective two of the poems in the collection, “Ordinary Time” and “An Irreverent Portrait of Father McLaughlin,” which are taken from the final two sections.

“Ordinary Time”

In “Ordinary Time,” the speaker recounts a visit with his wife to the office of her neurologist. The poem, in seven blank verse stanzas of eight lines each, moves almost meditatively from one experience to another as the speaker considers first the books in the waiting room, then the meeting with the neurologist, and finally the trip home. The opening words that bring the reader into the office are appropriately declarative and emotionally antiseptic: “We’re in the waiting room.” Here the present tense catches the reader up in the timeframe of the narration, and the first-person plural “we” invites an association with the speaker as much as it indicates the plurality of the speaker and his wife.

The studied ambiguity of the poem’s opening is extended over the delightfully metatextual and parenthetical consideration that follows: “(A metaphor? / Yes, I suppose it’s one you can’t escape.)” Summoning up the idea of the world as a waiting room for the world that lies beyond, the speaker is right to note that it is inescapable: no readers of this poem exist outside of that waiting room. But the second-person address adds an immediacy that further pulls the reader into the setting of the poem, complicating the opening word as the poem shifts to reveal the awkwardness of what Theodore Roethke might have depicted as a dolorous and lonely reception room. Then comes the “Fiddling with nothing,” and the “Church-like silences,” as the speaker browses the waiting-room offerings.

In the second stanza, another metatextual moment occurs when the speaker discovers poetry amongst the books. “My wife’s neurologist reads poetry?” he wonders, marveling at the revelation even as he simultaneously reveals the true nature of the “we” with which the poem opened. Naturally, the neurologist has seen fit “to mark the poems that talk about our bodies,” which the speaker quotes within the structure of his own poem, complete with a mid-line stroke to indicate the line break in what he is quoting.

There is something playful here in these metatextual moments, and it pushes back against the setting of the poem: the neurologist’s office, hardly a place that one would visit for fun or mere routine. But reading the poem and quoting it is another kind of “Fiddling with nothing,” a way of distracting the speaker (and his readers) from the difficult circumstances that have brought him to the office in the first place. And his wife, too, “wants to run away.” The sentences of the third stanza, most of which begin with “She,” describe what his wife would do instead of facing down the treatment: a credit-fuelled flight to a yacht, a villa, an island—an increasingly frantic list of alternatives to reality, and all in the singular: no “we” here. The opening of the fourth stanza returns both to the reality and to plural—as if the speaker is what is keeping his wife grounded. “But it’s our turn,” he interjects, interrupting the flights of fancy that ran through the third stanza. The waiting room is left behind, and the dread of mortality follows them into the doctor’s office.

The two stanzas that follow describe the relief as the threat gives way to a more positive diagnosis. The doctor takes a pride “so like a boy’s” in the recovery of “The girl he knew,” as if all three people present are transported back in time, back to the waiting room of life—an earlier incarnation of it—to experience joy in the simple act of having life itself. Then, later, when his wife errs about what the doctor said, the speaker and his wife can find themselves “Laughing like idiots on the way home” about the size of the threat, for it is a threat no longer.

Nevertheless, the tenor of the collection resists an easy slide into a too-happy ending in which there would be no sense of what might have been. The concluding two lines—“You see, that’s why I had to come along.” / Also, because, suppose she needed me…”—hint obliquely at the potential consequences of an unhappy result, without being able to evoke it directly in words and so spoil the exhilaration of the moment. For the speaker, it seems, the threat still lingers like a shadow in the mind—a ghost of what might have been; and so it must remain for his reader, as well.

“An Irreverent Portrait of Father McLaughlin”

In “An Irreverent Portrait of Father McLaughlin,” Nicol makes use of iambic pentameter once again, but this time across five twelve-line stanzas with a rhyme scheme of ABCDBEADECFF. This unusual rhyme scheme ensures that every line has one paired rhyme, without the position of the rhymes being familiar enough to the ear as to make them particularly noticeable. Similarly, there are many metrical substitutions employed across this poem’s sixty lines. The effect of these formal features is like the pastoral approach of the titular character: they mask an ever-present order behind an appearance of laxity.

That laxity manifests itself in various ways: McLaughlin is “the Bugs / Bunny of liturgists, whose faith alone / brings order to his spirit’s messy room.” His entire ministry consists of “God is Love”—“And hugs.” There is a mystic simplicity at work here, evoking memories of John the Apostle returning ever and again to the words, “Little children, love one another.” So, too, does the cup of McLaughlin’s generosity overflow, since “Avarice feeds his generosity.” A voracious reader, “The bookstore gets a quarter of his wages,” and yet he gives the books away to his friends, “then buys to read again.” Blessedly, perhaps, he is not unchanged by these literary encounters: he remembers the words, quotes them during his homilies, and builds a pastoral approach out of all the good things that have crossed his path. But, as the speaker thrice informs us, “Of all these words, he clings to only three.” Those words—“God is Love” are his ministry.

The words also govern his approach to homiletics, tying generosity of spirit to a generous tongue: “He talks a mile a minute,” the speaker notes, as if McLaughlin is trying to distill all that he has read so that he can give it to every parishioner sitting in the pews of his church, instead of distributing his books only to one person at a time. But these efforts are not always appreciated: in one appropriately inverted bit of syntax, the speaker remembers a time “Once, when the faithful turned eyes inward so / the ears still left to hear were hardly any.” The inward turning of the parishioners’ ears is here mirrored by the felicitous syntax of a line that would not be out of place in a poem by E.E. Cummings.

The speaker’s remembered moment is that of an act of personal generosity, cryptically announced by McLaughlin as “U.A. Fanthorpe’s in the vestibule.” The name means nothing to the speaker, nor to any of the other parishioners. And it is only when he arrives in the vestibule that he discovers that the message was meant for him: U.A. Fanthorpe is a poet, and Fr. McLaughlin has brought a copy of his poems to give to the speaker. Naturally, the speaker wonders, “an in-joke from the altar? Ill-advised. / But who was there to give advice? Not I.” For McLaughlin, the message is more important than the strict observance of the rule; the good deed matters more than the propriety which with it is conducted.

The book comes at a vital moment, when the speaker had been “drifting at loose ends, / puzzling over nothings.” McLaughlin’s intervention grounds him in a purpose echoed by his book’s description of Fanthorpe: “in touch / with the sustaining ordinariness / of things.” The key word here is “sustaining”—ordinariness not as oppressive or wearisome, but as nourishing; an inversion of the speaker’s present state, in which the loose ends of everyday life have become the scene of a pervasive diffidence. Instead, “McLaughlin takes a stand, that what he does. / Three words.” As the speaker’s description of his generosity reminds the reader, they are not words alone: they are an entire ministry and a way of life, radical in their simplicity, transformative in their effect.

Perhaps we, like the speaker, might have something to learn from Father McLaughlin’s example.

After the Carnival: Poems
by Alfred Nicol
Wiseblood Books, 2025
Paperback, 96 pages