Atomic Field: Two Poems

by Nicholas Christopher

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 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.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Nicholas Christopher was born and raised in New York City. He was educated at Harvard College, where he studied with Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht. Afterward, he traveled and lived in Europe. He became a regular contributor to the New Yorker in his early twenties, and began publishing his work in other leading magazines, both in the United States and abroad, including Esquire, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and the Paris Review. He has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the Paris Review 50th Anniversary Anthology, the Best American Poetry, Poet's Choice, the Everyman's Library Poems of New York and Conversation Pieces, the Norton Anthology of Love, the Faber Book of Movie Verse, and the Grand Street Reader. He has edited two major anthologies himself, Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (Anchor, 1989) and Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975 (Scribner, 1994) and has translated Martial and Catullus and several modern Greek poets, including George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos. His books have been translated and published many other countries, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from various institutions, including the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Yale, Barnard College, and New York University, and is now a Professor on the permanent faculty of the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Constance Christopher, and continues to travel widely, most frequently to Venice, the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and the Grenadines.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thoughtful, engaging, draw-you-in poems, a sequence that feels no need to rush. But I was haunted by the feeling of how much more I loved the poet's 5 Degrees and Other Poems. Atomic Field paled next to it.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poems of one young man's coming of age across a decade of tumultuous change: 1963-1973.