Poetry.
Poise and wit prevai.
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.
They summon the real world and simultaneously render it otherworldly.
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.
It\'s impossible not to fall in love." David Ferry "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.
Read all the rest, these poems by Alfred Nicol 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.
Read, for instance, the very last poem, "Nuts," and read the great "How to Ignore an Invisible Man," and you\'re hooked forever. "Dear reader, I\'ve fallen in love with this book, and that will happen to you too.
Nicol gives us a mature collection of quiet reflection, with wit and wisdom deployed through finely crafted poems of masterly formal dexterity.
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.
This is a collection rich in aphorisms on the bright and shady spectra of our interactions.
The subjects include the elephant, snake, sheep, skunk, bee, couple dynamics, the trials and triumphs of the ruler or the everyman.
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.
Poetry
