The Creation of the Night Sky

Abstract

Nicholas Christopher. The Creation of the Night Sky. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998. Near the end of Jim Thompson's classic roman noir, The Getaway, the protagonists leave behind a familiar but dangerous America to enter a darkly magical realm that appears on no maps and, for very practical reasons, has no official existence. It is the novel's most haunting moment, as the pulpnarrative trappings of flight and pursuit drop away to reveal a timeless landscape poised on the border between sleep and wakefulness. Nicholas Christopher is an experienced investigator of such realms, dispatching his findings in a series of well-crafted verse procedurals. Attentively following clues in a world without maps, Christopher has come to sound more and more like a seasoned private eye, but one who has read Stevens and Proust as well as Chandler and Hammett. Like any good detective, Christopher has an eye for plots, though the seductive narratives of his poems often prove as numinous as the dreams they pattern. Most often this poet occupies a tension-filled space where the teleological force of narrative begins to dissipate, and speculative contemplation takes over. From this vantage Christopher frequently turns a critical eye upon the plots which have framed his explorations, perhaps seeking liberation from the conventional narrative patterns that often encumber the lyric voice. Yet like the doomed protagonist of the film noir, of which Christopher has written so eloquently in his study of the genre, Somewhere in the Night, the poems in this latest collection find the errant poet seduced into further plottings. The Creation of the Night Sky succeeds as both a critical investigation of the narratives which inscribe us, and as lyrical meditation on the possibility of reinscription. Victim of Circumstances finds him standing outside of a plot that enmeshes one of his nameless characters, as the poet critically examines its threatening shape: Who can say that he, like all the rest of us, will not fall into the machinery of else's plotting gone awry. Leaving behind his own plots to entangle the lives of others years after his destruction. The shadowy figure described is as much framer as framed, yet he seems to have little choice in assuming either role. Christopher's syntactical weapon of choice is the sentence fragment. The halting rhythms of these lines seem to work as a blunt object against the implacable thrust of the narrative; yet this is also the staccato language of pulp fiction. Like the poet himself, who so deftly assimilates the voice of the detective story to his own, the protagonist steps naturally into someone else's plotting. Though this kind of entanglement in others' plots is largely threatening, it also represents a kind of continuity, a narrative legacy taken up and left behind. The poem turns quietly elegiac as it contemplates what this figure might leave to posterity: Will anything else survive him the contents of his mind, or of this room, or the of his worldly any longer than the cigarette ash he flicked last night that remains suspended in a spider's web? This passage seems to oppose the details of his worldly transactions to the plots which frame him, yet that last image could have been taken from, say, one of Fritz Lang's or Orson Welles's classic films noirs. Perhaps it's not possible to leave anything behind other than the occasional twist in an already-written plot, the eccentric arc in a cigarette ash flicked on cue. As much as he may be drawn to narratives, Christopher clearly employs them with some trepidation, and in this he is not unique. The role of narrative in lyric poetry has been an ambiguous one at least since the popular rise of the prose novel. Drawing on medieval romance and gothic conventions, the English romantics reimagined the lyric voice by placing it in explicitly fictional settings. …