Atomic Field: Two Poems [Hardcover]

Nicholas Christopher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 3, 2000

Nicholas Christopher is one of his generation's finest poets. The author of such masterpieces as In the Year of the Comet and The Creation of the Night Sky, he has earned a reputation for the sheer beauty of his verse, for his elegiac voice, and for his lush, redolent vocabulary. Now he presents two extended poems, set in the years 1962 and 1972. Each year includes forty-five poems that evoke the life of a young boy and, later, a young man, during those alternately calm and turbulent decades. Comic books, a first bicycle, television, candy stores, the threat of nuclear war, drug experimentation, travel in Europe, love affairs, questioning the world: these subjects form a common thread of growing up in middle-class America and of a young man entering the adult world, feeling and trying to understand its complexities, pains, and joys. An exciting and moving illumination of age and experience, Atomic Field is a major work by a celebrated American poet.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

Review

...their combined effect is less explosive than ethereal. -- The New York Times Book Review, Megan Harlan

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (April 3, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151005532
• ISBN-13: 978-0151005536
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,441,103 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Not for the realist., August 16, 2000

By 

Dave Primc (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Atomic Field: Two Poems (Hardcover)

Atomic Field: Two Poems is an epic adventure into the childhood of Nicholas Christopher. Each extended poem is made up of forty-five parts and each part describes events within a particular year. The first poem is look at the experiences of a young boy growing up in 1962. Christopher succeeds in presenting several images that are vivid, surreal and truly capture the mind of a child. The second poem is a success as well, delving into different adolescent experiences a decade later in 1972. As in Christophers previous poetry the images are crisp, and he achieves a very authentic voice. This entire collections reads in a dream-like manner so successfully woven together one can hardly put it down.