'3.3 billion years ago we caught a break . . .' So states the first line of Christopher Buckley's new poetry collection Chaos Theory, setting the tone of casual erudition, an atomic fusion of the personal and the cosmic. The book's theme is a perennial one: Chaos Theory is really about finding the underlying order in apparently random data. True to his word, Buckley gives us "Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop" by Little Anthony & The Imperials: - '... particles; the cathedral of the atom, and Gunsmoke, The Whistler, Mr. & Mrs. North-- / zooming past / the cosmic street lamps, ' bids us make the connections along with him. It's a startling, deliriously pleasurable enterprise, poem by poem. As we reach the end of our cosmic journey through Chaos Theory, we feel like one of the imagined aliens huddled at last around Voyager's Golden Records on some distant planet, understanding dawning in her eye or ear, as an x-ray of a human hand and snowflakes over Sequoia appear on a hologram, followed by a recording of the greeting "May all be well" in Ancient Sumerian and the brainwaves of Ann Druyan considering human violence and poverty and falling in love.
I don't think I know of another poet who has such vertical range and depth; Buckley manages to have one foot In the physical muck and tenderness of the world and the other foot planted among the stars and galaxies of the universe.... There is something here that is deeply human and courageous, something like what I find in the essays of Loren Eiseley. And all of this would be nothing, of course, without the language, which is the glory of these poems.
--Peter Everwine
There is a deep nostalgia here, but also wisdom and common sense, and beautiful writing. I welcome him at his maturist, poet of stardust.
--Gerald Stern
These poems ask questions about an individual's place in the universe and about the existence of the universe itself.... In his captivating voice, Buckley invites us to consider ideas of the mundane and the divine, ontology and epistemology, and what on earth we are here for.
--Jerome Blanco, Zyzzyva
These are poems of immortality and extinction that can still make you smile ... [Buckley] has an exquisite ear for language and a gutsy way of blending
bravado with humility.
--Library Journal