Star Journal: Selected Poems

by Christopher Buckley

Star Journal is a selection of poems from Christopher Buckley's twenty previous collections, from 1980-2014.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

Published October 10, 2016

About the author

Christopher Buckley is a poet. For 2007-2008 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry at the University of California Riverside.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Daniel Klawitter]

The first poem, "Why I'm in Favor of a Nuclear Freeze" is very good. But the majority of the poems I just did not find particularly engaging and I quickly lost sustained interest. They are written in the dominant modernist/free verse mode without any surface benefits of meter, rhyme, or much musicality to propel you along, so not much time passed before I found myself starting to skip lines here and there to get to the poetic meat which, in the end, I found rather lean indeed in terms of memorable language arranged in an artful way. Not my cup of tea this, but it may be yours depending on your aesthetic preferences and tolerance for more prose-like poetry. I am a fairly ecumenical poetry lover (While I lean more towards formalist and new formalist poets, I do love T.S. Eliot and I like William Carlos Williams and Philip Levine as well)....but this just didn't do it for me and I expected much more from a Selected Poems which is usually an author's greatest hits of everything they have written to date.

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christopher Buckley has been described by others as a modest poet, and these poems do take up seemingly small amounts of time on the page, most of them focusing on memories or ruminations, often in a tongue-in-cheek sense of the word. But the real mastery in this collection is the sense of focus in time. Buckley flows easily from memories to the minute particles that make up our everyday lives to the large cosmos itself; perhaps because star dust itself seems to be small particles. What results is a collection that is keenly aware of but expertly deals with the ideas of scope and space. At times the poet can drift into nostalgia, which can make it difficult for those of us (such as myself) who do not have that nostalgia for the fifties. but I can appreciate it anyway. My favorite poems in this work were the ones that focused on landscape. This is not a flashy book of poems but an appreciative, meditative one.