Is the name Christie meant to recall Christ?
No, and I’m still wishing I hadn’t used it. It was a working name, the name of a teacher I once knew who was irritable and cynical like the character I was creating. I was going to change it because I knew it would sound like a religious reference, but I left it a bit too long and couldn’t make any other name feel right to me. Christie, in my mind, is a man embittered by the loss of the earth. He hides from emotion in cynicism, which is why in the final poem he has a hard time expressing passionate emotion and has to resort to constant repetition of one phrase, “look at it”, like a mantra. In my mind he’s probably an alcoholic and he’s certainly an atheist. He thinks belief in an afterlife is very harmful, because it leads people to live for this imagined, non-existent future and ignore the present and the world they live in. But though he doesn’t believe in the Bible he was brought up with it and quotes it all the time – eg in “Esau”. Which, incidentally, is a crap poem; it’s far too
