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Zero Degrees at First Light
Christine Potter's Zero Degrees at First Light is a collection of poems that heightens the everyday and commonplace, finding the unexpected beauty and grace that inhere in the world. Simply but elegantly written, this mature collection marks a thoughtful and attentive poetic voice.
80 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2006
5 people want to read
About the author
Christine Potter
6 books244 followersChristine Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a very old (haunted) house on a creek in Rockland County. She has an organist/choirdirector husband (Ken) and two spoiled tom cats. One of the house's two ghosts lives in the room behind her office.
Christine's newest book is a YA time travel novel, What Time Is It There? (The Bean Books, Book 3), newly released by Evernight Teen. The first book in the series is Time Runs Away With Her, and the second is In Her Own Time.
Her two poetry collections are Zero Degrees at First Light (2006) and Sheltering in Place (2013). She has also had poems published in Rattle, Fugue, The Irish Examiner, HOOT, Eclectica, and The Pedestal, among other magazines. Her third book of poems, Unforgetting, is due out this spring from Kelsay Books.
Christine's newest book is a YA time travel novel, What Time Is It There? (The Bean Books, Book 3), newly released by Evernight Teen. The first book in the series is Time Runs Away With Her, and the second is In Her Own Time.
Her two poetry collections are Zero Degrees at First Light (2006) and Sheltering in Place (2013). She has also had poems published in Rattle, Fugue, The Irish Examiner, HOOT, Eclectica, and The Pedestal, among other magazines. Her third book of poems, Unforgetting, is due out this spring from Kelsay Books.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 7, 2008
Every poem in Christine Potter’s first book of poetry, Zero Degrees at First Light, contains some form of light or some object that is fused with light from the moon to windows to chandeliers. Her poems evoke nature, music, family, a 200-year old house and high school teaching. She also has a gift with sounds, especially ending vowels. All of her chosen poems evoke her world and we see the magic in each of the small moments she creates with craft and care. Her skills lie in her remarkable first lines, which then take her leading narrative into fresh paths and angles that the reader is not expecting. She strikes a mostly serious tone in her poems, but then flashes of her humor are evident her two sonnets, one about the closing of her favorite sushi restaurant: "On the Closing of Ichi-Riki, Nyack, NY (Where I Have Eaten for Twenty Years" and the other about teaching 9th graders: "On Teaching Romeo and Juliet for the Sixteenth & Final Time."
For instance, in the poem, “To My Husband, Who Dreamed of Tidal Waves as His Father Was Dying” starts off with
I think of your father born, instead,
in a hospital I have never visited: bright high windows,
Then the poem moves in another direction as old age is likened to a sunset, and not to waves and we discover, “Everything but light lies.”
The poem ends on the image of stars, “silent as new ice and perfect, perfect –”
She also believes in the circuitous nature of time and she interprets time effectively in her poem, "Developing Prints, Age 13"
Ruth,
when I'm twenty-two, I will meet you on a commuter train
and you will be married to a bullfigter and tell me
that giving birth feels like having your heart pulled out.
As a reader we're in the present and then we're whisked away to the future, so we possess a fuller picture of the speaker's emotional journey.
She also jumps around in the time in the poem, "Chintz Couch":
Years later, in antique stores, I will find couches
like the one we cast off, but they will be strangers
who whisper the ends of stories I can't imagine,
prayers with the wrong words, from strange religions.
Another example of her time folding is in "Sleeping in an Empty House"
We don't know yet the chimney leaks creosote behind the walls,
how the wiring, too, could lose us this place.
We haven't seen the single, perfect beam, half-covered with bark
I look forward to reading more of Christine Potter's poetry with her finely tuned ear and boundless imagination.
For instance, in the poem, “To My Husband, Who Dreamed of Tidal Waves as His Father Was Dying” starts off with
I think of your father born, instead,
in a hospital I have never visited: bright high windows,
Then the poem moves in another direction as old age is likened to a sunset, and not to waves and we discover, “Everything but light lies.”
The poem ends on the image of stars, “silent as new ice and perfect, perfect –”
She also believes in the circuitous nature of time and she interprets time effectively in her poem, "Developing Prints, Age 13"
Ruth,
when I'm twenty-two, I will meet you on a commuter train
and you will be married to a bullfigter and tell me
that giving birth feels like having your heart pulled out.
As a reader we're in the present and then we're whisked away to the future, so we possess a fuller picture of the speaker's emotional journey.
She also jumps around in the time in the poem, "Chintz Couch":
Years later, in antique stores, I will find couches
like the one we cast off, but they will be strangers
who whisper the ends of stories I can't imagine,
prayers with the wrong words, from strange religions.
Another example of her time folding is in "Sleeping in an Empty House"
We don't know yet the chimney leaks creosote behind the walls,
how the wiring, too, could lose us this place.
We haven't seen the single, perfect beam, half-covered with bark
I look forward to reading more of Christine Potter's poetry with her finely tuned ear and boundless imagination.
March 9, 2022
Lines both clever and beautiful. Poems, almost rich with meaning, a couple that are excellent. Yet what is missing? When I read, I feel like a cog that should slip stolidly into place somehow slips across instead, and I do not connect. Something between the lines or something in the backstory or subjects pushes me away, mostly, instead of pulling me in. And *I* feel responsible for not fully appreciating these poems. That they are better than I am allowing.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews