Witness/participant, "blasé as a boulevardier/ in the spring Paris air," Buckley couples a lyric poet's urgency with a storyteller's feral patience: "claptrap until my heart started doing double-takes-/ the bus driver with my retreating hairline, the mechanic/ with my beard and a little wound of ink or motor oil/ leaking from his breast pocket."
These poems will take you, reader, from "the edge/ of the cliff" to "the tideline" and "outside the Arlington Theater" of a remembered matinee into a rumination on coyotes and stars. From One Sky to the Next-both in, and out of, this world-one of the strongest collections I've ever read-keeps pulling me back.-Roger Weingarten
Author Biography:
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY lives in Santa Barbara, CA. STAR JOURNAL: SELECTED POEMS was published by Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Recent books are The Pre-Eternity of the World, Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press, and The Consolations of Science & Philosophy, Lynx House Press.Among several critical collections and anthologies he has edited are A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis, 2004, with Alexander Long; Homage to Vallejo, Greenhouse Review Press, 2006; and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, with Gary Young, 2008.With David Oliveira and M.L. Williams he is editor of How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets, 2001, and he has edited On the Poetry of Philip Levine: Stranger to Nothing, Univ. of Michigan Press 1991, and FIRST LIGHT: A Festschrift for Philip Levine on his 85th Birthday, 2013. The Backwaters Press published Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees, edited with Christopher Howell in 2011, and in 2012, again with Gary Young, Lynx House Press published, One for the Money: the Sentence as a Poetic Form. With Jon Veinberg, he edited Messenger to the Stars: A Luis Omar Salinas New Selected Poems & Reader, in 2014.He has recently edited The Long Embrace: Contemporary Poets on the Long Poems of Philip Levine, Lynx House Press, 2020; and NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS-Interviews & Essays, Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press, 2021.Buckley's work was selected for Best American Poetry 2021. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry for 2007-2008, and has received the William Stafford Poetry Prize from Rosebud in 2012, and the James Dickey Prize for 2008 from Five Points Magazine. He was awarded a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing to the former Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, two awards from the Poetry Society of America, and is the recipient of NEA grants in poetry for 2001 and 1984. Other awards include the City Works National Writers Award for 2006 from San Diego Community College, and the Kenneth O. Hansen and Vi Gale poetry awards from HUBBUB magazine. He was the winner of the Campbell Corner Poetry Contest form Sarah Lawrence as well as annual poetry awards from Tieferet magazine, Nimrod, Alligator Juniper, and Zone 3.Over the last 35 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, Plume, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Five Points, New Letters, The Harvard Review, & The American Journal of Poetry.
