Barnes and Noble
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Barnes and Noble |
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Since his poetry began appearing in the New Yorker when he was in his early twenties, Nicholas Christopher has been praised as one of America's most important poets by John Ashbery, Charles Simic, Anthony Hecht, and James Merrill, among others. Crossing the Equator collect Christopher's best work from the past three decades and includes a section of new poems that are among his finest. Exploring with equal brilliance the labyrinths of history and the human heart, the jagged magic of urban life and the illuminations of travel, the luminous, transformative voice of Crossing the Equator puts on display Christopher's dazzling power and myriad depths.
Reviews
The Washington Post Book World
"One of our most inventive writers . . . To read [Christopher's]
richly honed and sensuous work, which has so much tensile
strength, is to visit other worlds and then return to our own,
disturbed by time, but also refreshed and reawakened."
It is always a good sign when a poet's new poems are his best poems; it is an even better sign when those best poems have a distinct (and developing) relation to his first poems, for a poetic incarnation has thereby been established and can be trusted to persist without odious comparisons of early and late, better and worse.
Such auspicious signs prevail in the work of Nicholas Christopher, whose three decades of poems, lyric and narrative, can be read through with enormous pleasure and considerable wonder. The theme throughout is the prolixity of the real and the singularity of the unreal, and though the temperament that registers such things is essentially a happy one, Christopher confronts the catastrophes of the present — what he calls "the token correspondences of this world" — with the same dazzle and dash he employs to treat the loveliness of life he appears to know so well:
… the blue trees
where the solitary lovers …
curl into the shadows
like cats and count the stars.
Consequently, among his astonishing new poems Christopher celebrates "Robert Desnos in Havana, 1928" — that sleepy surrealist "searching for a single elusive mermaid/and finding them everywhere" until he must face his "real moment of truth":
for Robert Desnos the twenty-second of February 1944
when the Gestapo knock at his door in Paris
and ship him to Buchenwald where he reads the palms
of his fellow prisoners recites poems and records his dreams
of mermaids in notebooks bound for the furnaces …
Likewise, in his first collection of 1982 he speaks crucially for "Walt Whitman at the Reburial of Poe," brooding on Poe's death in a polling booth:
how perversely American in the end —
a man who had consumed himself with exotica,
green as the Republic itself,
poet of our bloodied ankles and ashen bones …
I wonder who he voted for.
Not that these evocations of dead poets are especially characteristic of Christopher's worldly entertainment. He is a poet of immensely various delight in the variety of experience ("the clouds that could be islands / and the islands that are clouds"), and indeed, most of his poems, so drenched in sense-memories, are adjurations to us to look more closely at the anthology of pleasure the world offers us even in our drastic moments.
Now see the sun setting behind the palms,
see the weedless lawn and the Florentine fountain,
see the clay court steaming through the vines,
see Hollywood to the north dirty and pink …
In fact, I can think of no other American poet of such consistently lively production who is so loyal to what Wallace Stevens liked to call jubilation — such loyalty adhering, of course, to the tragic possibilities of pleasure as well as the mere enjoyments taken by "citizens consigned / to the coarser precincts of the night / taverns public baths brothels." What the superbly phrased poems of Nicholas Christopher resemble most — and, come to think of it, it must be no accident that the poet has written a study of "film noir and the American city" — is the restless lens of a master cinematographer determined to alarm us even as (or because?) he enchants:
Tonight the moon rises above rooftops & bridges
spreading its sea of silver light
stilling vast crowds
and for an instant reflected whole
in the spectacles of a blind man
sitting alone in a parked car
Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times
The New Yorker
“14 rue Serpentine: A Paris Notebook,” one of the new poems with which Christopher begins this three-decade retrospective, assumes what has become the poet’s signature form: episodic narrative achieved by means of short scenes, as in an art film, with swift cuts and special effects. Christopher, who is also the author of four novels and a study of film noir, is an enjoyably indulgent director: “You’re dreaming of the velodrome / the rings of Saturn spinning / with riders who blur away / like those fast-motion films / of flowers blossoming and dying.” He asserts, “Sometimes it’s not hours but years that pass in a single day,” and that is precisely the sensation induced by this dreamlike and highly visual collection, where punctuation is often scarce and the plausible—a girl in a yellow bikini drinking Campari, say—can quickly turn surreal.