5 Degrees and Other Poems (Penguin Poets) - Softcover

Hart Crane once wrote to Sherwood Anderson of his hope to find a "form that is so thorough and intense as to dye the words themselves with a peculiarity of meaning." For Christopher, that form is the title poem here, a dense and stunning, often elliptical sequence of 35 interlocking poems. Like the Arctic adventurer John Davis, who figures prominently in the poem, Christopher explores themes of spiritual transcendence, magic and history as they coalesce in the mind of the unnamed narrator one night on the streets of New York City (where the temperature is 5 ). Displaying an almost Borghesian fascination with the underbelly of history, Christopher (In the Year of the Comet) cites Herodotus, lunar cartography and Harry Houdini, linking his poems to resemble a circular room of mirrors. The poems-each shimmering with immediacy-deflect the reader into such subjects as the Nazi occupation of an Aegean island or the friendship between Van Gogh and Gauguin. Along with this difficult but immensely rewarding poem are collected 25 shorter, mostly lyric poems. Notable among these is "Terminus," a powerfully moving political poem written in response to altrocities committed in the Yugoslavian civil war.
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Christopher's fifth book of poems begins with a series of interlocking poems (with allegorical elements) that all are generated by a single night in an enormous imaginary city in which the temperature is five degrees. For the most part, the ambitious sequence succeeds, and Christopher's language is as bewitching as the inhabitants of his fantasized metropolis. These include Harry Houdini, introduced as an aviation pioneer who does magic only as a hobby; an angel who signs a man's name in blue light on a black wall; and the goddess Inanna descending into the underworld on razor-sharp, slippery steps. After the sequence come 25 lyric and narrative poems; their subjects range from hibiscus tea in a dying man's room to observations of a city street at 6 a.m.; their locales, from Vietnam to Bosnia. In all the poems, Christopher beautifully combines empathy and distance, mystery and exploration. Elizabeth Gunderson