Atomic Field: Two Poems

by Nicholas Christopher

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.

Genres: Poetry

95 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.