A poetic epic of a young man's entry into adulthood in 1960s and '70s America, by an award-winning poet and novelist.

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 world: 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.