Atomic Field: Two Poems - Hardcover

Christopher, Nicholas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151005532 ISBN 13: 9780151005536

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000

Synopsis

An awardwinning poet offers a stunning epic in verse tracing the comingofage of a young man, presenting two long poems set in 1962 and 1972, with each year containing fortyfive shorter poems that unforgettably capture the essence of American life.

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas Christopher is the author of six books of poetry, several anthologies of contemporary American verse, a study of film noir, and three novels, including the recently published A Trip to the Stars. His work has been widely anthologized. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

All the old obsessions--stars, ice, girls, lost eras--are rekindled in Christopher's seventh book of poems. Two long poems--"1962" and "1972"--make up the entire collection, defining the poles of a decade in 90 page-long lyrics (45 per year). The whole might read like a Blakean "Songs of Innocence and Experience" were it not so tonally bland, a monotony emphasized on both sides of this rite of passage by each poem's single-page, single-stanza composition. Most stack up images that culminate in an epiphany. Many are sexy ("smoking blond hash in a Pyrex pipe--/ smoke the color of the moon's aureole--/ I unbutton your ankle-length tie-dyed dress") and appealingly quirky ("where the numismatist / when he is not in his tiny shop / where every cabinet is always kept locked / cultivates the hydraponic tomatos from Egypt / and orchids from Java"). Others revel in a grotesque burlesque, summoning a hometown troupe that includes limbless freaks, morticians and gypsies. Christopher has ample moves to cut a lyrical rug, whether ruminating on an aqua-powered Hydromobile where a family donning space suits in 2162 are "filling the car's fuel tank with a garden hose" or documenting the dread of suburban ennui where a housewife prepares a meal "for the bearded man naked/ under a quilt dotted with cigarette burns/ on a sofa with no legs, Daffy Duck on the portable/ television inches from his sleeping face." But too many of the poems end statically on words like "cold," "nothing" and in references to a cosmos both desolate and tired.There is a mythic, Ritsos-like ambition here, but the nostalgic quotidian of a decade joining the poet's adolescence and adulthood fails to generate the requisite sparks. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1972

On my twenty-first birthday I find myself
at the edge of a desert
with a map of the stars-
not the ones in the sky overhead,
but in galaxies where even now time is just beginning.
Stars we will never see in our own lifetimes:
the ones that light up behind the eyes
of a baby about to be born
and the man who takes his dying breath.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151005532
• ISBN 13: 9780151005536
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 95