Zero Degrees at First Light, Poems by Christine Potter

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.

Sample Poems by Christine Potter

"In Zero Degrees at First Light, Christine Potter seines the dark lake of the past, and what she nets is riddled with color, scent and music. Throughout this collection, her images are precise and evocative. Weather moves up from its usual position as backdrop to become a fully clothed presence in poem after poem. While scavenging neighborhoods, churches and classrooms, untangling and interpreting the braid of experience, she repeatedly offers the reader threads of hope. In ïOn the Town's Edge This Morning,' she admonishes us to ïlet day dazzle you as if you were water/and could row yourself home.' Let these compelling poems dazzle you; then trust them to row you safely home."--Kelly Madigan Erlandson, Born in the House of Love

"Christine Potter's poetry maps the distances in our shared terrain of family and community. In topics that range from music to sushi to childhood regrets to the solidity of faith, her lyrics hit their marks cleanly. They vibrate with impact long after they end. To quote from Potter herself, these are poems ïglowing in all the right places.'"--Rachel Dacus, Femme au chapeau

"Christine Potter's passion for the natural world can be described as mystical. Her poems are joyous in their immersion in nature, marriage, faith, and work, but never so joyous as to become oblivious to the poet's rightful sobriety of vision. The material world is present and accounted for. Its events are closely followed and sorted for ripeness, proportion, and possibility. If there is meaning to be discerned in an image or a sequence of events, if there is discovery to be had in a story or an acre of land, a friend or a 200-year-old house, Christine Potter is there. She presents it modestly, effortlessly, in sync with her environment. Her poems radiate spirituality, synchronicity, and peace though they rarely touch upon matters of religious belief. These are the poems of an eminently sensible mind in a healthy body, someone who understands the balanced and balancing nature of insights about mother, father, and husband. Christine Potter has settled into her own lyricism like a bursting seed in black earth."--Terese Coe, The Everyday Uncommon

Christine Potter is a retired public school English/Creative Writing teacher who lives on a creek in suburban New York with her husband, Ken, a church organist. She is the head moderator at the Alsop Review’s poetry forum and workshop, The Gazebo, and has also been a chef and a ringer of tower bells. Christine is a staff member at WDFH-FM (www.wdfh.org) out of Ossining, NY. She and her husband have two bossy, spoiled half-Siamese cats, Desmond and Molly Jones, who have enjoyed disrupting the writing and production of this book.

ISBN: 1933456442, 80 pages

Order from Amazon