Crossing The Equator: New and Selected Poems 1972-2004 – The Poetry of a Nationally Acclaimed Literary Voice

by Nicholas Christopher

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. 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.



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"

Genres: Poetry

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

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

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

While Nicholas Christopher is primarily known for his novels, his poetry is as sensuous and rich as his prose, albeit almost decadently so. That being said, Christopher's poetry illustrates his ability to compress a line and play with motion and time with almost dizzying precision. One can feel the bit of the influence of Elisabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, whom Christopher studied under, but Christopher's magic realism and ability to use cinematic cutting between scenes really make him distinct from the late modern poets who taught him. Unlike many poets, I think he strengthens as a poet with age, so the I enjoy the second half of book a bit more than the first. A great read.