Poet John Yau has gone so far as to liken Geoffrey Nutter to the offspring of Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein, conceived in Elysium. Such acclaim is ultimately meaningless, if for no other reason than the fact that I (like most others) cannot conceptualize the Elysian intercourse of Stevens and Stein. 

Christopher Sunset is not the product of heavenly union by literary demi-gods. Instead, the volume emerges in response to the far more tangible exasperation that surrounds the world of contemporary poetry. As the poet confesses in “Thanksgiving,” “I’ve been puzzled long enough by modernity and its poems” (63).

As a consequence of such puzzlement, the poems contained within Christopher Sunset tend to consider the power of imagation to create something of a modern mythos that both reflects and reflects upon the contemporary condition. In many regards, the essence of the collection is encapsulated in the opening lines of the poem “The Sea and the Bells.” The narrator states: “I walked toward a big sound/Nautical imagery/(the sea and the bells)/through which passed/the Age of Seasons/on its way to a late convergence” (34).

Christopher Sunset fixates on nautical imagery—boats, streams, jelly-fish, clouds, bells, sea-shores, waves, etc—and as a consequence, the sea comes to symbolize the poetic and intellectual frontier. The poet, in search of the “The Big Thought,” looks out to sea. There he may see, “far away, small as a symbol/a big thought, just floating out there/on the fresh, loud sounds of the sea” (27).

At times, Nutter’s work permits the “big thought” to remain elusive. Before some poems (like “Miguel de Unamuno” or “The Year of Sleep”), the reader stands baffled by a density of imagery. Before others (such as “Cantilever Bridge” or “Nineteen Thirty Five”), he struggles to extract an idea of consequence or gravity from among the mundane and the simple.

In contrast, the works “The World in Love” and “Je Dors, Mais Mon Coeur Veille” are simply tremendous. These pieces testify to the best of Nutter’s poetic capacity, as they incisively balance intellectual depth with imagistic cohesiveness. Such works buttress the reader in his quest to discover a “big thought” within each poem. Inevitably, each reader will abandon some of Nutter’s work—they will stand before some poems unable to see the thought that, if it glimmers, shines too distantly and too dimly for sight. Yet these readers will, I imagine, re-read such works before dismissing them. Such hesitation is, in truth, unique within the poetry world of today.

Christopher Sunset neither resolves the malaise of incomprehensible contemporary poetry nor redeems the discipline from the torpor of social, intellectual, and (to a large extent) emotional inconsequence. Nevertheless, the book begins to confront such charges. Its strongest works betray the origins of a new and tantalizing poetic in which poetry may glisten with the wonder of a thought that is both evident and ever out of reach.