Bicentennial
Poems
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed poet—a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning.
Bicentennial summons the world of Chiasson’s seventies childhood in Vermont: early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, and the Bicentennial celebration, but his book is also an elegy for his father, whom he 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 of Bicentennial, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Chiasson (Where's the Moon, There's the Moon) delivers a fourth collection with his trademark poultice of wit, tightly honed formalism, and reimaginings of the world around him. In "Away We Go," where his speaker sarcastically sobs, "O my collectible dinnerware,/ I've hunted everywhere for answers," we find Chiasson addressing a bird as a member of the IRS auditing "the Spring's enormous income/ while I piss my windfall zilch away." "I turned the pain up/ In my poetry," he writes in "Vital Signs," and, true to his word, Chiasson explores a life lived without knowing his father through lenses of pop culture, history, and the raising of his own children. His more formally experimental writing, including two plays in verse and several poems that absorb echolalia, ventures into fascinating new territory, questioning the nature of existence and the creation of art with equal parts curiosity and dark resignation. "If you exist," says a faerie in "The Ferris Wheel in Paris: A Play," "you must use your existence to erase every earthly trace of yourself." Such booming statements set the stage for the book's eponymous closer, which moves via smash cuts through Chiasson's youth in 1976, arriving at a place of startling clarity through a voice unencumbered by either literary decoration or expectation. Chiasson clears a new path towards "something enormous/ And potentially dangerous."
