Bill Christophersen

Where Truth Lies Bill Christophersen

It was Keats, of course, who brought our attention to Truth and Beauty and their deceptive interchangeability. The beautiful and truthful poems of Where Truth Lies left me breathless with admiration. Bill Christophersen in a witty poet, and he's a learned one, too, with echoes of his great forebears throughout, including Milton, Keats and Whitman. And yet the poet wears this learning with a blessed lightness. Indeed, Christophersen invites us warmly into his world here, including the sadness of loss with a father's passing, and does so with a bracing formality at times, as in Emily Dickinson's line: "After great pain a formal feeling comes." I recommend these poems wholeheartedly.

-Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015

Real virtuosity effaces itself. Russell Procope's fingers never seem to move on the pearls of the alto. Bill Christophersen's Where Truth Lies has that seamless sheen, that immediacy, that voice at once funky and honed. Christophersen weighs Shakespearean against Petrarchan in his finely calibrated sonnet scale, but what you remember is the book's visceral heart; time's imperative, the adversary who never knows us and whom we never see.

Truth for Christophersen is existential, never prescriptive. There's a "book of hours" hidden here, but we aren't told what to do with those hours, and they aren't coming back. And truth is in the details: "the air a silk cravat" is lovingly enclosed in parentheses; the searing "Old Book" is a poem in a book in a poem in a book. Where Truth Lies is a thrilling collection.

-D. Nurkse, author of Love in the Last Days