For this last “Months” post of the year — and please don’t take this as a knock against December poems (I thought about mentioning W. S. Di Piero’s “Chicago and December,” or Linda Bierds’ “The Neon Artist in December,” or Kenn Nesbitt’s kids’ poem “December 26.” or any number of excellent poems about snow) — I just must revel for a moment longer in Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales (because the rule is you have until New Year’s Day to finish up the Christmas books). I love it for all its wonder and humor and nostalgia, but even more so for the language, which alternates between lush, luxuriously alliterative figurative passages like,
All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.
(such a joy to say aloud), and the simpler telling of what happened,Continue reading “December”