Bicentennial: Poems [Hardcover]

From the acclaimed poet—a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning.
 
Bicentennialsummons 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 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. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Whiting Writers Award, Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College.Overtime

In this alternate basketball nobody plays,
Both players try to tie the score:
That way, at the buzzer, the game isn’t over.
 
Look, a show of courtesy: the winning player
Is helping the loser score, the way
Our youths assist the cold, suffering elderly.
 
Or here, a boy is helped to understand
The exotica of his changing body:
When X turns to Y you do not die;
 
When Y turns to Z we lӟ