Dan Chiasson

Checked this volume out of the library upon getting the wonderful The Sun in my inbox as the Poetry Foundation poem of the day (95% of the poems of the day are rubbish, but it's still worth subscribing for the 5%).

I'd say this is the best piece in the collection, but I do like a lot the obtuse couplets which form the bulk of the verse on offer here. Chiasson's writing is always surprising, supple and sly, but sometimes slides into academic too-clever-by-halfness as he ropes in Randall Jarrell and Horace in ironic supporting roles. Wallace Stevens makes an appearance too, and at its best the poetry here is reminiscent of Stevens' playful, percussive probing at the warp of reality. Pliny is obviously the main inspiration, and his observation (quoted) of an abused elephant privately practising his tricks by night is so moving it lends real heft not just to the three elephant poems but the book as a whole.… (mehr)

More sort of vaguely run-of-the-mill contemporary modernist-lite free verse from New Yorker scribe and Wellesley prof Chiasson. I finished it about a week ago; the physical book is in my apartment in New York, and I am sitting in Pennsylvania trying to remember a single distinguishing thing about it other than that he writes about masturbation a lot, and that Kay Ryan -- who, whatever else you say about her, writes poems that are instantly identifable -- blurbed it. That pretty much says it all.… (mehr)