'3.3 billion years ago we caught a break . . .' So states the first line of Christopher Buckley's new poetry collection Chaos Theory, setting the tone of casual erudition, an atomic fusion of the personal and the cosmic. The book's theme is a perennial one: Chaos Theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data. True to his word, Buckley gives us "Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop" by Little Anthony & The Imperials: - '... particles; the cathedral of the atom, and Gunsmoke, The Whistler, Mr. & Mrs. North-- / zooming past / the cosmic street lamps, ' bids us make the connections along with him. It's a startling, deliriously pleasurable enterprise, poem by poem. As we reach the end of our cosmic journey through Chaos Theory, we feel like one of the imagined aliens huddled at last around Voyager's Golden Records on some distant planet, understanding dawning in her eye or ear, as an x-ray of a human hand and snowflakes over Sequoia appear on a hologram, followed by a recording of the greeting "May all be well" in Ancient Sumerian and the brainwaves of Ann Druyan considering human violence and poverty and falling in love.
Author Biography:
Christopher Buckley's Star Journal: Selected Poems was published by the Univ. of Pittsburgh Press in 2016. Back Room at the Philosophers' Club, Buckley's 20th book of poetry (Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press), won the Lascaux Review's Poetry Book Prize for 2015. SFA Press also published Varieties of Religious Experience in 2013. Rolling The Bones won the 2009 Tampa Review Poetry Prize and was published by the Univ. of Tampa Press in 2010, which published White Shirt in 2011. Buckley was a 2007-2008 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. He has been awarded a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing to the former Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, two awards from the Poetry Society of America, and received NEA grants in poetry for 2001 and 1984. With Gary Young, Buckley is the editor of The Geography of Home: California's Poetry of Place (Hey Day Books, 1999). With David Oliveira and M.L. Williams, he is editor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (The Round House Press, 2001). For the Univ. of Michigan Press Under Discussion series, he edited The Poetry of Philip Levine: Stranger To Nothing, 1991. More recently he has edited the poetry anthologies Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California (with Gary Young) Alcatraz Editions, 2008; Homage To Vallejo, Greenhouse Review Press, 2006. With Alexander Long, he edited A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington Univ. Press, 2004); with Christopher Howell, Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees (The Backwaters Press, 2011); again co-edited with Gary Young, One for the Money: the Sentence as a Poetic Form (Lynx House Press, 2012); and with Jon Veinberg, Messenger to the Stars: A Luis Omar Salinas New Selected Poems & Reader ( Tebot Bach, 2014). Over the last 40 years his poetry has appeared in APR, Poetry, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Hudson Review, The Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Five Points, The Harvard Review, & New Letters.
