Reader's Digest: January 6, 2024

I don’t think of myself as a “prose poem person.” I like (some) poetry but I am rarely a fan of the lyric essay or its relatives. I’ve made an exception, though, for Nina MacLaughlin’s Winter Solstice, on the basis of a sparkling review by Helen Treseler in the LARB:

Like Joyce or Virgil, MacLaughlin plays with a full rock band—casting a spell with her alliteration (“fat flakes,” “wide wings,” “glittering ... galactic”), rhymes and slant rhymes (“low ... snow,” “black ... thwap”), assonance (“croaking ... throats,” “inside ... light”), and expertly varied pacing. Riding this sonic riff, she segues from the guttural cries of paired swans to the lovers’ midday tryst, inviting the reader to follow her run of associations. This is poetry disguised as prose…

Treseler’s description brought to mind one of the few lyric essays I have loved. At some indeterminate age—maybe eight years’ old?—I stumbled on A Child’s Christmas in Wales and was awed by the sentences, like nothing I had ever read b…