\n<\/p>\n
For those of us north of the equator, winter officially arrived last week. The early darkness and the chill in the air demand a change in our habits. For many, the season provokes an unmistakable turn inward\u2014toward our warm homes, or the loved ones we see on holidays, or meditative thoughts that, in other times of year, might be crowded out by the light and noise of the world.<\/p>\n
Perhaps saying so is sentimental, but these feel like the perfect days and nights for poetry. The form can capture, perhaps better than any other, the muffled quality of cold afternoons and days spent indoors. Its winding paths of language can describe both the season\u2019s comforts and its harsher qualities. As 2025 winds down, we\u2019ve selected some poetry to accompany you through the last days of December. Each collection speaks to a different wintry mood, but all are worth slowing down with before 2026 brings the return of longer, busier days.<\/p>\n
Selected Poems of Rub\u00e9n Dar\u00edo<\/em><\/strong>, translated by Lysander Kemp<\/strong><\/p>\n Once, after an epiphany in a high-school class, my best friend declared that she had made up her mind to study literature in college. This was years ago, but I remember that day well: She said that analyzing a Dar\u00edo poem had made her realize how beautiful an arrangement of words can be. Many of his works double as fairy tales, and have been adapted into children\u2019s books. This is why my first exposure to Dar\u00edo, one of the best poets to ever write in Spanish, came when I was 3 or 4\u2014in the form of a princess story that I love just as much now. My father, too, can recite from memory a Dar\u00edo verse he read as a young man: \u201cand the neck of the great white swan that questions me.\u201d This volume of Kemp\u2019s translations includes my favorite Dar\u00edo poems; their rhymes are lost, but their dreamlike, hypnotic quality is preserved. And the sensual images these verses bring to mind\u2014nightingales and angels and silks\u2014make this collection ideal for evenings beside the hearth.\u00a0 \u2014 Gisela Salim-Peyer<\/p>\n Selected Poems of Rub\u00e9n Dar\u00edo<\/p>\n By Rub\u00e9n Dar\u00edo<\/p>\n Rangikura<\/em><\/strong>, by Tayi Tibble<\/strong><\/p>\n On a snowy day, you could curl up by the fire with something wholesome and cozy; you could perch by the window with something chilly and somber. Or you could crack open the New Zealand poet Tayi Tibble\u2019s Rangikura<\/em>, which is none of these things. Playful, forceful, and sexy, it radiates so much heat that choosing it for a holiday read is like fleeing south for the winter. (And in Tibble\u2019s home country, December is<\/em> summer.) That\u2019s not to say it\u2019s unserious: Tibble reflects on the relentless shame she used to feel about her gender and her Indigenous M\u0101ori heritage; she charts how she emerged from timidity like flowers peeking out from a melting blanket of ice. Rangikura<\/em> is the result of her transformation, and it is a persuasive case for freedom, pleasure, and fun that honors the generations of women in her family who also celebrated, shouted, and danced. \u201cI\u2019m hotter than the sun,\u201d she declares. \u201cAnd my ancestors ride wit me \/ like dawgs. When I whistle \/ they run and run and run.\u201d\u00a0 \u2014 Faith Hill<\/p>\n Midwinter Day<\/em><\/strong>, by Bernadette Mayer<\/strong><\/p>\n In her diary-like, book-length poem, Midwinter Day<\/em>, Mayer sets out \u201cto tell the story of exactly what is happening.\u201d The book duly follows a course from her waking hours to the \u201clong black night\u201d of the winter solstice. In the middle of the book, she stops to note the time: \u201cIt\u2019s 1:15 pm,\u201d she writes, as she leaves the market. \u201cWe\u2019re going home with what we can have to carry. \/ Having had to pay for it \/ And the sun comes out.\u201d Mayer isn\u2019t the first author to turn a single day into her plot, but her loving transcription of life in 1978 Lennox, Massachusetts\u2014her children drawing at the kitchen table, their visit to the library, the pattern of snow Mayer sees on a roof, the red brake lights that shine on the wet street\u2014makes a string of ordinary events feel like quiet epiphanies.\u00a0 \u2014 Walt Hunter<\/p>\n Was It for This<\/em><\/strong>, by Hannah Sullivan<\/strong><\/p>\n Sullivan\u2019s poems are so long that only six appear in her books. Half of these are in her 2018 debut, Three Poems<\/em>, and the other half appear in her follow-up, Was It for This<\/em>, which juxtaposes an elegy for the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire with two gratitude-laced meditations on aging. Throughout, the depth and quality of Sullivan\u2019s attention to prosaic detail\u2014even plain and unappealing objects\u2014never wavers. She lingers on microwavable \u201ccorn cobettes\u201d; on a crumbling library book that turns into an \u201costeoporotic spine \/ all particles, frayed ribbon, \/ skin stubs, moving in the \/ light.\u201d Such appreciative concentration is rare in this era of rush and scrolling, but in \u201cWas It for This,\u201d the collection\u2019s most meditative poem, Sullivan writes, \u201cThe things that I instinctively saw as ugly I wanted to see also, under another aspect, as beautiful.\u201d When I read her, I want that too.\u00a0 \u2014 Lily Meyer<\/p>\n The Wilderness<\/em><\/strong>, by Sandra Lim<\/strong><\/p>\n Lim\u2019s searching book is best read in complete silence. It rewards the focused, careful turning over of words and phrases. And it is studded with winter imagery: \u201cNo clouds toppled across the snow wilderness. \/ No gloom-dark tree-glitter winding and twining its silks. \/ Blankness, egg-quiet,\u201d she writes in \u201cWintering.\u201d This book is dead serious about the human condition, determined to ask existential questions about life and willing to linger in its mysteries. Yet this ambivalence doesn\u2019t show up in Lim\u2019s syntax, which is sure-footed, precise, and vibrant. She begins one poem, \u201cCertainty,\u201d by referencing the Puritan poet Edward Taylor. His verse, she notes, is \u201cfull of deep piety, \/ learned and quiet, but sometimes an errant wildness runs under \/ the seams of his words.\u201d The same could be said of the poems in Wilderness<\/em>\u2014they read like a long, slow breath after the crush of a hard year.\u00a0 \u2014 Maya Chung<\/p>\n The Bridge<\/em><\/strong>, by Hart Crane<\/strong><\/p>\n How successful is Crane\u2019s modernist epic, a poem meant to stride as confidently across American geography and history as the mighty Brooklyn Bridge spans the East River? Nearly 100 years after its publication, the jury is still out. But even those who consider The Bridge <\/em>a spectacular failure tend to be impressed by Crane\u2019s ambitions. As T. S. Eliot does in The Waste Land<\/em>, Crane wants to connect rapid, destabilizing change with mythic currents of emotion. He clasps Walt Whitman\u2019s hand and briskly rouses Rip Van Winkle; all the while, he conjures trains and telegraph wires tearing across the country, buffeted by a hurricane of contemporary references. Making sense of all of this requires measured, deliberate reading, my ideal kind of project for the dead week between Christmas and New Year\u2019s. Helping with this task is a fantastic annotated edition edited by Lawrence Kramer (which is being reissued this spring). Crane was a motivated, but frustrated, visionary. This makes him fascinating\u2014and makes The Bridge <\/em>worth the trek from promenade to promenade.\u00a0 \u2014 Emma Sarappo<\/p>\n The Bridge: An Annotated Edition<\/p>\n By Hart Crane<\/p>\n The House on Marshland<\/em><\/strong>, by Louise Gl\u00fcck<\/strong><\/p>\n Gl\u00fcck, a Nobel laureate, was a poet of few and careful words. Her work is often described as \u201cspare\u201d or \u201caustere\u201d; a solitary aspect to her poems makes them the perfect companion after an early sunset. Gl\u00fcck often directs her focus toward self-reflection, but her second collection, The House on Marshland<\/em>, also scrutinizes a stark, chilly natural realm marked by \u201cthe barrenness \/ of harvest or pestilence.\u201d The opening poem, \u201cAll Hallows,\u201d is sublimely, high-mindedly eerie, and it is one of my favorites. In later poems, Gl\u00fcck includes plenty of flowering trees and signs of new life, but those are freighted with warning: As she writes of spring, \u201cwith the first leaves \/ all that is deadly enters the world.\u201d Perhaps there\u2019s comfort to be found in the stillness and blankness of winter.\u00a0 \u2014 Quinta Jurecic<\/p>\n The Complete Poems of John Keats<\/em><\/strong>, by John Keats<\/strong><\/p>\n Some of Keats\u2019s best poems brim with references to the seasons and their attributes, whether a spring musk rose, \u201cmid-May\u2019s eldest child,\u201d or the \u201cmists and mellow fruitfulness\u201d of autumn. But picking up the 19th-century Romantic at the end of the year feels especially apt. That\u2019s because Keats, who died at just 25, was obsessed with the finality of things, with an unavoidable fear of life ceasing to be. Reading him this season can be a humbling reminder of our finitude. And yet, his descriptions of winter\u2019s \u201cpale misfeature\u201d or of \u201cdrear nighted December\u201d\u2014its ability to make him wonder, \u201cwere there ever any \/ Writh\u2019d not of passed joy?\u201d\u2014are wildly alive; they suggest that there is much to be gained by reflecting on loss. With this poet, even musings on mortality point toward beauty, no matter the month.\u00a0 \u2014 Luis Parrales<\/p>\n The Complete Poems of John Keats<\/p>\n By John Keats<\/p>\n \u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" For those of us north of the equator, winter officially arrived last week. The early darkness and the chill in the air demand a change in our habits. For many, the season provokes an unmistakable turn inward\u2014toward our warm homes, or the loved ones we see on holidays, or meditative thoughts that, in other times<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39250,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[2430,546,4680,8310],"class_list":{"0":"post-39249","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-dark","9":"tag-days","10":"tag-poetry","11":"tag-winter"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/39250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}