Evening Star Waltz

Evening Star Waltz, Bill Christophersen's seventh poetry collection, blends autobiographical verse with poems about the culture at large. The primary speaker of "Country Music," the first grouping, is a musician, but some of the poems tap the political meaning of "country" as well. In the long poem "Jogging the Cross-Country Trail," an aging runner revisits the site of his high-school track competitions-and with it, recollected experiences of the 1960s. The past-source of nostalgia, rue, amazement and irony-is a recurring subject.

Variety rather than uniformity of tone, voice or style characterizes the collection. Humor offsets reflection; dramatic and narrative verse alternate; free-verse poems abut sonnets and haiku. In such poems as "Nightlights," "Paris Triptych," "Still Life with Crackerjacks" and "Postmodernist Cloud," romantic and naturalistic elements vie. A theme emerges in the title poem: When prospects are dark and the wine has been drunk, the music is what must sustain us.

"Poets who are also musicians-Bill Christophersen is one of them-know that each note must be attended to because it will soon disappear. So when they write, they're conscious of how specific each word must be. And, like a song, the poem, even as it spreads over you, must have-to sustain its readers-a throughline. 'Shepherd of Wasps' sews together music, love, living a life, and honoring a friend. In 'Highland Zing, ' music embodies the human situation. 'The Fish He Fry' is a straight-ahead narrative till the poet wraps everything into a last line, like the closing crash of a symphony. So too the title poem, 'Evening Star Waltz': music festival in the woods, getting dark, recent hurricane, too wet for a fire-'All we had, going forward, was the music.'"

-Dick Lourie, author of Jam Session and Other Poems