A Review of After the Carnival by Alfred Nicol

Review by Steven Knepper

Alfred Nicol, After the Carnival. Wiseblood Books, 2025.

Review by Steven Knepper

Alfred Nicol’s After the Carnival begins with a winsome villanelle titled “The Path.” It’s about a little hike, a little out and back again. The path leads up a hill (“not too demanding”) where one can catch sight of a reservoir (a “view” not too “commanding”). The first and third lines of the opening stanza establish the refrains of the villanelle, and both assure us that this hike really isn’t a big deal. They deflate expectations while gently coaxing us out on the trail:

          It’s not a path that takes you very far.
	  It starts across the field from where you’re standing
	  but only brings you back to where you are. 

The ultimate effect of these refrains, however, is to underscore the little treasures, the humble gifts, that the path does have to offer. Its glimpse of the reservoir framed by “two pines,” its squirrel and swallows, offer a quiet respite, a quiet wonder. “It’s better, though, than sitting in the car,” the poem proclaims, perhaps gesturing at how often we shut ourselves off from such humble gifts. (No coincidence, I think, that the path is compared to “a door that’s left ajar.”) The poem, continually addressed to “you,” gently invites you through that door, out on that path. It’s a poem of whimsical understatement that gives adults something to think about but also works as children’s verse.

I may be mistaken, but I think “The Path” subtly echoes Robert Frost’s “The Pasture,” which served as the lead poem in both Frost’s breakthrough collection North of Boston and his Collected Poems:

          I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
          I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
          (And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
          I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

          I'm going out to fetch the little calf
          That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
          It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
          I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

“The Pasture” is not a villanelle, but it does have a repeated refrain, and it too invites “you” on a there-and-back-again rural outing. There is even a similar rhetorical deflation (“I sha’n’t be gone long”). While the voices of the two poems are different, they have similar touches of whimsy and wonder. There’s a reason that the Poetry for Kids: Robert Frost, edited by Jay Parini, begins with “The Pasture.” If I’m correct about this echo, then Nicol, who lives in Massachusetts and went to college in New Hampshire, is giving a nod to the towering figure of New England verse.

Nicol’s echo of “The Pasture” may be fitting in another regard. More than one scholar has noted that “The Pasture” invites the reader of North of Boston into what turns out to be much more troubling and confusing territory. The narrative poems of North of Boston deal with heartbreak, broken relationships, loneliness. Nicol’s After the Carnival at first seems exceedingly upbeat by comparison. But in its middle pages, it offers a series of harrowing narrative poems to match a poem like Frost’s “Home Burial.” Indeed, Nicol’s “Ballad of the Terrible Silence,” which explores the high costs of addiction, brought to my mind precisely that Frost poem of a lost child and a broken relationship. I will not give away too much about it here, but I will say that “Ballad of the Terrible Silence” haunted me for days. The poems in the middle of After the Carnival may even hit harder because it takes us longer to get to them in the collection. Not only “The Path,” but a number of early poems are charming and, from this angle, disarming. (The Goya painting on the cover probably should have been a warning to me that the hard hits were coming.)

I do not want to overdo the Frost comparison. Frost is a poetic ancestor of Nicol’s. (I first met Nicol at the Frost Farm Poetry Conference, and after the first two stanzas of “The Path” I wondered if he might be talking about the little Frost Farm trail.) But he is not writing as directly in the rural New England poetic lineage of Frost and Donald Hall as a contemporary poet such as Dan Rattelle, whose collection I reviewed this past summer. In his endorsement of After the Carnival, Robert B. Shaw notes the echos of “Frost and Robinson,” but concludes that “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.” Nicol does indeed range widely here in both form and tone. (Even his most Frost-like narrative poems tend to be written as ballads, which, as Dana Gioia has noted, was never Frost’s preferred form.) There are sonnets but also two sequences of haiku. There is light verse and religious verse.

There is also religious light verse, such as the long poem “Wretched Rocco,” which first appeared in the Winter 2025 issue of New Verse Review. In this hilariously mordant poem, the speaker relishes the thought that his feline nemesis Rocco—directly addressed throughout the poem—is bound for divine punishment in the hereafter:

          No miracle of fish, whiny Rocco.
          No mackerel on your dish, griping Rocco.
          As the Saints go marching in
          they’ll toss your way an empty tin.
          No miracle of fish, irksome Rocco.
          There’ll be no scrap that you can ferret
          in the world the meek inherit.
          No miracle of fish, irksome Rocco.

But as the poem progresses, the speaker admits that he might not be so much better than the whiny, griping, irksome Rocco. We build toward an ending where speaker and cat are stuck together, forever: “We’ll have to pay for our mistakes. / Let’s see how long forever takes. / Forever. You and me, wretched Rocco.” By poem’s end, we have both a surprisingly convicting examination of conscience and a tongue-in-cheek No Exit scenario with the speaker and Rocco.

Another highlight of the collection is a series of twelve fable-like sestets about birds: “Robin,” “Black-capped Chickadee,” “Herring Gull,” “Bobolink,” and so on. These poems reflect close observation of the different species, but they range in wit, wisdom, and wackiness. (Nicol is a particularly fine poet of animals. His earlier collection was aptly titled Animal Psalms.) Here, as a representative sample, is “American Crow”:

          A Crow utters hello as if it coughed.
	  A crow prefers the jagged to the soft.
	  For cherubs, clouds; for crows, a broken limb.
	  The crow is disinclined to stay aloft,
	  nor can it lift its voice to join the hymn.
	  Who hasn’t worn this darkness? Graceless, grim.

What starts as an observation of sound and environ becomes a metaphor for a certain personality type by mid-poem. But as in “Wretched Rocco,” the final line prevents us from keeping this type at arm’s length. Who isn’t, at some point, this kind of crow?

In sum, this is a strong collection by a virtuoso in form and rhyme, a poet who has interesting things to say and who says them in interesting ways that engage both ear and mind. “The Path” that Nicol invites us on in the collection’s opening poem turns out to be a much weightier, much more momentous journey than the opening poem suggests, but it is indeed well worth the venture. You come too.

Steven Knepper edits New Verse Review.

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If you’d like to read sample poems from Nicol’s collection, here are links to a few in their original publication venues:

“Talking All Night” in First Things

“Gibbous Moon” in America

“The Man in the Middle” in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal

“Tell You The Story” in Literary Matters

“Wretched Rocco” in New Verse Review