Product Description
Dan Chiasson has been hailed in America as 'one of the most gifted young poets of his generation' (Frank Bidart). This book - his first to be published in Britain - brings together poems from his first two US collections, "The Afterlife of Objects" (2002) and "Natural History" (2005), along with more recent work. "The Afterlife of Objects" is a kind of dreamed autobiography in which the enigmas of an individual mind become universal puzzles. "Natural History" takes its inspiration from Pliny's encyclopaedic "Historia Naturalis", suggesting that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders - and equally in need of a compendium of everything known. 'Dan Chiasson has succeeded in writing the poetry many of his generation aim for: free-swinging, gorgeous in movement, bold in imagination, athletic in movement...the imagination is an organ of perception, a means of feeling' - Robert Pinsky. 'Dan Chiasson is a wilfully literary poet - one who invokes (and impersonates) writers both classic and modern, meditates on the function of poetry, plays self-consciously with voice and toys shamelessly with time. Yet he can also lay down a clean, unadorned lyric line...There is something serious behind the literary shenanigans - an ambition to write larger than any one self stirs the book to life' - Kay Ryan, "New York Times Book Review". 'Like Emerson's "transparent eyeball" or that of Pliny, Dan Chiasson's gaze is curious, friendly, and unassumingly all-encompassing. Like William James (another mentor), his distinctions are smooth and profound and capable of sudden crescendos of meaning that are heartbreaking in their intensity' - John Ashbery.
About the Author
dan chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont, and educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, where he completed a PhD in English. A widely published literary critic, Chiasson is the author of One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. He has received a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award, and teaches at Amherst and Wellesley colleges. He lives in Sherborn, Massachusetts.
