The conjuror's gift of summoningup a fleeting, palpable and tantalizing vision is everywhere present in these radiant poems. In the opening lines of "Waking in the Country":
First it is the unfallen snow
the birds are using for a trampoline.
In the recollection of a young man in love:
I came to your door with a rain-soaked hat,
My ears ringing with footfalls and bells --
As you pointed out, the streets were silent
And there had been no rain for weeks.
It is present in enchanted portrayals -- of Circe, "abbess of magic,/tangler of souls," and of the sassy, intriguing "Rita," whom we encounter in various guises and locales through Mexico, Florence, Knossus, Marseilles, Vermont...Rita, who, swimming, "nestled her bones inside waves/That tossed them like dice..." Rita, "suspended in a pirouette, gold/And divine." A beautiful poem tells of the twenty-year-old Rimbaud crossing the Alps, another of Whitman at the burial of Poe. Here we are in a cosmopolitan world as well as in a world of orchard winds, salted vines, rainbow fish, deserted promenades strung with pennants. On a haze-thickening, heatstruck evening, "there are even two moons in the sky,/and even the dreamers see them."
Here are poms that are musically rich and visually exhilarating, poems that
project with both brio and tenderness the awakening, the power, and the pleasures
of feeling. Here is the distinguished debut of a truly original young poet.
"An extraordinary debut. Nicholas Christopher is a brilliant writer...It
is amazing to read a first book with this kind of verbal precocity, and one
can only prophesy a remarkable future for him."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Mr. Christopher's poetry is not merely extraordinarily good, but seems
to me altogether in a class by itself. What I like best about his work is its
busy, vigorous tempo, and the obvious and justified delight the poet appears
to take in his own work. The poems move with speed and confidence and an a
admirable inventiveness that seems everywhere filled with the cheerfulness
appropriate to fine performance."
--Anthony Hecht