The poems are verbally so rich, generous, inclusive, wry. I like especially the orientation to the large-picture physics/cosmology at the same time that Buckley relates his own past. . . . I like the tone—how else to address one’s mortality & mixed luck except with irony & affection stirred with gratitude?
—Dennis Schmitz
Published by Cloudbank Books
More Praise for Early & Late
These incredibly generous poems are challenging and comforting at once, thanks to Buckley’s brilliant ability to consider, contain and invoke in a way that includes us all.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
The fluidity of words and syntax combines with his flare for sound and image to create astoundingly beautiful moments. Buckley has the ability to extend a poem from an image or other occasion of language into an absorbing meditation on existence, or on the condition of the human soul and of the god who may or may not be present somewhere.
—Phoebe Davidson, Review/Revue
Buckley is our own sweet cynic, practicing, in vernacular disguises, the golden style of vision and language recommended by Virgil, the acid doubt of Donne and Alan Dugan. Reading his beautiful poems, I feel brotherhood, sustenance, and the grace of a not quite Godless song.
—Garrett Hongo
About the Author
Christopher Buckley grew up in Santa Barbara, California, surfing, playing and teaching tennis. He taught writing for over 40 years at several universities, including the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He lives there now with his wife, the artist Nadya Brown. Buckley’s work was selected for Best American Poetry 2021. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, a Fulbright Award Creative Writing, and four Pushcart Prizes. He has published 30 books of poetry and edited several critical collections and biographical anthologies. He recently edited Naming The Lost: The Fresno Poets—Interviews & Essays, 2021, which he considers his most important work, preserving the thoughts and ideas of the core group of the Fresno Poets, 1960-80.
A poem from EARLY & LATE
New Clouds
Here they are again, wadded across the length
of the washboard blue, napkins flung
from the afterlife. . . . How open to suggestion
they have always been, carrying nothing
with them of the past, content to leave almost
everything behind . . . . When I was 8, or 9,
and took afternoons off to look at the moon suspended
on the blue, dissolving like a shaving of ice,
I had little idea how little it all might come to—
I invested in clouds, and look, I’m surrounded
each fall a hundred-fold, by riches of a sort beyond
all use. I wonder now, I wonder . . .
what more was it I thought I wanted out of life
as I peeled an orange and tossed the pulp-
white bits into the brush? Clouds are composed of
almost nothing, the veil of nothing—
beneath which I am inevitably taken up with
a wish to breathe, and re-form forever.
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