Most New Year poems hand out resolutions. Anne Scott Musil's "New Year" hands out questions, and it is nervous about the answers. It opens with the speaker taking stock, "what learned?", and asks whether a year of living has made them any wiser. Do they "see / snow and faces better"? Can they "slip out of / clouds & gestures"? Do they have "honest tact"? The poem ends on another question, "Are we bleached by sun-drench, / wider?" Between those two uncertainties it makes its central claim: what we do with time is less about seeing more clearly than about continuing to reach for each other.
The opening stanza sounds like a mind thinking faster than its grammar. "what learned?" has no subject and no verb to carry it, and the lowercase "i" makes the speaker small. The hoped-for improvements are all about perception and behaviour. "X-ray beats of water earth" imagines seeing through surfaces to the pulse underneath. "Honest tact" pairs two virtues that often pull against each other, so even the hope is complicated. "Clouds & gestures" suggests vagueness and empty show, the things the speaker would like to escape.
The second stanza is memory, and it goes blurry on purpose. "Hard to remember / how it was" gives way to something ordinary, "the usual / toast cheese", before the syntax floods. In "night crickets waves / water terrors lonely days" there are no commas, so the nouns slide into one another and the reader cannot tell where one image stops. Ecstasy and terror arrive in the same breath. Time itself becomes a predator: "minutes attack / moments of ecstasy." Minutes belong to the clock, moments to feeling, and the line break after "attack" makes the verb land hard.
In the third stanza the "i" turns into "we", and the poem is suddenly about two people, or perhaps a close group; the text doesn't say. "Living side by side / we grew distant shouting" holds closeness and distance in one line. Then comes "the preying preyed on beasts / of unwanted thoughts", where the repeated word sounds almost like "praying". That fits the stanza's next move to religious language, "our holy grail love." Judging by the imagery, love here is both hunted and holy, something the couple chase through their own worst thoughts. The stanza's best line, "love beat between the breaths", places the heartbeat in the gap between breathing, and its run of b sounds acts out a pulse. It also echoes the "x-ray beats" of the first stanza.
The closing stanza is where the poem's meaning settles. "New Year it still / goes on the groping" can be read as an address to the New Year or as a plain statement, and the missing punctuation allows both. Either way, the verbs have changed. The first stanza was full of sight ("see", "x-ray"), but the ending is all touch: "needing touch", "reaching", "groping". Groping is what people do in the dark, which makes it an unglamorous word. Yet it leads somewhere, "to glad opening." The final "wider?" quietly answers the "wideness light" of stanza two, so the poem begins and ends by hoping for more room. "Bleached" is deliberately double-edged. It can mean drained of colour or made clean, and the poem leaves the choice open.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre here. The rhythm follows breath and hesitation, with short lines, abrupt enjambments ("still / goes on"), and capital letters that appear only occasionally. That looseness suits a poem about not having finished learning.
What makes "New Year" worth reading is its honesty about the gap between wanting to improve and actually changing. It does not claim the year has made anyone wiser. It suggests that the real achievement may be persistence, the willingness to keep reaching across distance even after shouting and fear. A fresh calendar offers a clean start. The poem finds something humbler and more believable: another year of groping toward the light, together.