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
