Winter Light

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.