The Creation of the Night Sky: Poems

by Nicholas Christopher

Nicholas Christopher's newest collection displays both his trademark mastery of language and astonishing range. In elegaic verses of surpassing beauty we are taken from the lush islands of Hawaii to the streets of Greenwich Village after midnight to a sparsely attended Las Vegas funeral. Whether he is describing items lost and found or a woman drowning in a stormy sea, Christopher's verse is filled with moments of spiritual illumination that confirm his reputation as one of the most important magic realist poets writing today.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Nicholas Christopher was born and raised in New York City. He was educated at Harvard College, where he studied with Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht. Afterward, he traveled and lived in Europe. He became a regular contributor to the New Yorker in his early twenties, and began publishing his work in other leading magazines, both in the United States and abroad, including Esquire, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and the Paris Review. He has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the Paris Review 50th Anniversary Anthology, the Best American Poetry, Poet's Choice, the Everyman's Library Poems of New York and Conversation Pieces, the Norton Anthology of Love, the Faber Book of Movie Verse, and the Grand Street Reader. He has edited two major anthologies himself, Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (Anchor, 1989) and Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975 (Scribner, 1994) and has translated Martial and Catullus and several modern Greek poets, including George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos. His books have been translated and published many other countries, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from various institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Yale, Barnard College, and New York University, and is now a Professor on the permanent faculty of the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Constance Christopher, and continues to travel widely, most frequently to Venice, the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and the Grenadines.

Reviews

[Timothy Juhl]

Not a complete loss of a collection, despite some longish poems. Thankfully, some of the longer poems were narrative and when he succeeded with that form/technique, he hit it on the head. Other poems fell into the more academic tradition, the kind of poems many people hate because it asks the reader to interpret between the lines to understand what the poem's meaning.

The last 1/3 of the collection was a singular bit of epic poetry written in a unique form: in the idea of a daily journal written as poem entries. The section went from January thru September, and not every day. It seemed to mostly follow a narrative line about someone's death (maybe a relative, maybe a doctor). Sometimes these entries worked, other times they just felt like random lines and didn't necessarily connect with anything previously read or later to come. I did like the concept though and with my rating, I will keep this collection. Who knows. I might tackle this poem as journal idea.

I do love when a poet provides something like a talisman or totem in their poems and in the journal section, he often invoked an image from a box of wooden matches, one with the King of Sweden as its trademark. It appeared in perhaps four of the poems, but every time, it stopped me and usually made me smile.

[Jennifer Collins]

Christopher's books--poetry and prose alike--have the flavor of dreams, and this book is no different. The stand-out here is the long sequence which ends the book, "Night Journal: a poem in 35 entries". Readers of his A Trip to the Stars will feel the same lyrical, journeying mode at play here, albeit in much shorter form, but some of its beauty comes in the way that his characters are more figures of shadow and silhouettes than fully-discovered persons or subjects. There's both a distance and an intimacy to them, and the entries are rather magical as they pull together into what he writes (as introduction) is a sort of story in itself that nevertheless became far more personal than a true journal might have.

And that's some of the magic of his poetry and his prose. However fictional or created they may be, they ring as if they're written for the reader, driving at personal truths and delivering up ideas that were only waiting for the right reason to arise.

I nearly always find his worlds and his words a little bit magical. And while I don't adore his poetry quite so much as I adore his prose (such as A Trip to the Stars, which I'll always recommend and recommend over again), this little collection was no different.

Recommended to poetry lovers and to Nicholas Christopher fans.

[Kalle Wescott]

I read /The Creation of the Night Sky: Poems/, by Nicholas Christopher:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

His poems are incredible!

Here's one:

"suggests it was in a previous life
I emerged from a long tunnel
echoing sharply with horses' hooves

and a cradle moon just a sliver
in a bracelet of stars
was poised above the steep cliff

from which a cloud of birds veered
pitch-black towards the breakers
a ship's light rising and falling over the horizons

and someone on a bluff calling to me
the wind drowning out the words
I hear now years later when I approach the sea"

[Josie]

Captures the 1990s urban feeling exceedingly well—the first A+ book of the year.

[Jonathan]

Night Journal of much more interest than the poems in the first part, I feel.