Dan Chiasson is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Bicentennial (2014), and a book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (2007). His essays on poetry appear widely. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College.
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The Afterlife of ObjectsPoemsFrom"The Sensible Present Has Duration"
Outside, my grandfather wheeling
a pesticide tank
from tree to tree, spraying everything
with thick, white foam –
bark, leaf, apple flesh –
salting the garden
with handfuls of red sand, dissolving
aphid, Japanese beetle, horned tomato worm
as thick as rope. Gone
in an instant, emerging
from his fiberglass outbuilding shed, helving
an axe, bright blade, pine handle,
to eliminate
a dwarf peach weakened by nesting beetles.
O ordinary axe
The Afterlife of Objects:Poems -
The Afterlife of ObjectsPoemsFrom"Ward"
I came quietly where
my grandmother
was an insect
in an iron hive.
No drop
of water fell
more quietly than I
fell through
the elevator shaft.
The Afterlife of Objects:Poems -
The Afterlife of ObjectsPoemsFrom"Blueprint"
The Lord so loved the world
he sent
a steaming pile of
lasagna for
my ninth birthday.
A plate. Another. One
cascading square
waits on
a spatula; our priest
arrives. My mother greets him.
His peck
on my forehead
is full, unwelcome.
He squires me
from relative
to relative
collecting gifts:
sweater, eight-track, monster mask.
The Afterlife of Objects:Poems
“[Chiasson’s] poetry is genially brainy, jokey, casually formal, sometimes essayistic and humorously oracular.” —The New York Times [on Bicentennial]
“These poems refract the sober realities of middle age, in particular the joys and anxieties of fatherhood and grief at the deaths of friends or parents.” —The New York Review of Books [on Where’s the Moon, There’s the Moon]
"Dan Chiasson has succeeded in writing the poetry many in his generation aim for: free-swinging, gorgeous in phrase, bold in imagination, athletic in movement. What makes The Afterlife of Objects distinctive and distinguished is that in these poems imagination is more than the mere monitor of a language-show. Here, the imagination is an organ of perception, a means of feeling." —Robert Pinsky
Selected Works
