Bicentennial: Poems

Description

From the acclaimed poet-recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters-a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning. Bicentennialis, in the poet's words- "full of the things a boy growing up when and where I did-Vermont in the seventies-experienced- early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, the Bicentennial celebration...but my book is also an elegy for my father, whom I never knew, and who died in 2009." In these poems Chiasson movingly revisits the kind of autobiographical poems he wrote as a young man, but with a new existential awareness that individuals are always vanishing in time, and throughout the collection he ponders time's conundrums; "All of history, even the Romans,/ they happen later, tonight sleep tight," he tells his sons at bedtime. "You'll learn this later. Tonight, goodnight." In the topsy-turvy world ofBicentennial, history has both happened and is waiting to happen; boys grow up to be men; men never forget what it is to be boys; and fatherhood is the best answer to fatherlessness.

Dan Chiasson is the author of three previous collections of poetry, most recentlyWhere's the Moon, There's the Moon, and a book of criticism,One Kind of Everything- Poem and Person in Contemporary America. His essays on poetry appear widely, and he serves as a poetry editor ofThe Paris Review. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowhip, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Writers Award, Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College.