Pleasure in the world writ large

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. *