Nicholas Christopher is one of his generation's finest poets and has earned a reputation for the sheer beauty of his verse, for his elegiac voice, and for his lush, redolent vocabulary. Atomic Field 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, television, the threat of nuclear war, drug experimentation, travel to Europe, love affairs--these subjects and more 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. A moving illumination of age and experience, Atomic Field is a mayor work by a celebrated American poet.