Book Description
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 such literary talents as John Ashbery, Charles Simic, James Merrill, and Anthony Hecht, among others. Crossing the Equator collects 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 and transformative voice of Crossing the Equator puts on display Christopher's dazzling power and myriad depths.


Cold missiles and a rain
of embers accompany the men
who slide like shadows into the city
faces mud-smeared
stones for teeth no eyes

who slit the throats of everyone
they encounter until breaking down
my door they drag me into the darkness
that floods the corridor
and lock me in an icy chamber
-from "The Last Hours of Laódikê, Sister of Hektor"






About the Author
NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER is the author of seven volumes of poetry and four novels, including most recently Franklin Flyer. He is a regular contributor to the NewYorker, Esquire, the Nation, the New Republic, the Paris Review and other notable magazines, and has received numerous awards and fellowships. A professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, he lives in New York City.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Lake Como

The searchlight of a February moon
at the end of the street
bare trees black railing
an eastern star set like a pearl atop a steeple
that shadows the doorway
where the one-armed card sharp squats
shuffling his deck on a milk crate
waiting for the No. 6 bus to discharge
the off-duty cop the seamstress
the drunken mechanic and the clerk on crutches
who pauses before his building to watch
the mechanic lose three dollars at blackjack
and then stiffly ascends the five flights
to his two rooms on a shaftway
hanging his coat on a hook
and sitting down at the table
on which this morning he placed
a soup bowl and spoon
a tin of crackers and the crossword
puzzle he had been laboring over
beneath the gaze of his late wife
her color photograph propped up in a small frame
a young woman in a boxy dress and felt cap
waving shyly by the edge of a lake
where over her shoulder beneath a clear sky
a sailboat rides the wind
passengers on the polished deck
gazing at the glowing mountain peaks
the cypresses lining the shore
and the pink palazzi with ancient gardens
these men and women in white
who seem to live upon the water
gliding among themselves oblivious to strife
and all else that wears a body down
some sipping from crystal goblets
others just drinking in the light


Copyright © 2004 by Nicholas Christopher

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FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 collects 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

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.

Publishers Weekly

Drawing from 32 years and seven-plus books of poems, Crossing the Equator: New and Selected Poems 1972-2004 offers broad swaths of Nicholas Christopher's peripatetic career. Novels like Veronica and A Trip to the Stars are left out in favor of work from the verse novella Desperate Characters and nine new poems, two of which are serial works, like "Ultima Thule": "Drawing into the dusk/ the cartographer discovered his lines/ took on a life of their own." Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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