In the year of the comet

"After his success with Desperate Characters (LJ 9/1/88), a novella-in-verse, Christopher has returned to his lyric mode, characterized by short, unadorned lines and lots of kinky, almost surreal detail. He likes to jazz up his poems with ''girls, '' who often seem to be dropped into the landscape: ''In summer a girl sat/ there every afternoon/ in a yellow bikini, / fedora, and wraparound/ sunglasses . . ./ drinking Campari.'' ''Girls'' also appear naked, wearing turbans, as comic strip characters, as lovers, as barefoot beggars, in silk pantaloons, in Columbus's dreams, in red leather, raped by imperialists, and made up as Mussolini, and Christopher's campy way of being serious can grow tiresome. But there are some gems here--''On the Peninsula, '' for example, in which a sensuous sea floor of torch-lit fish and yellow crabs become ''where our bodies, locked fast, /turn under a blue sheet.''-- Ellen Kauf man, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York (fantasticfiction.co.uk).