Dan Chiasson

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Dan Chiasson has been hailed in America as ‘one of the most gifted young poets of his generation’ (Frank Bidart). His latest collection, Where's the Moon, There's the Moon, takes its title from an improvised children's game. It is a book about staged loss and staged recovery and how, in our games as in our poems, made-up losses depict real ones. At the book's centre is the title-poem, a long exploration of being a father in light of having lost one. His previous book from Bloodaxe, Natural History and Other Poems (2006), brought together poems from his first two US collections, The Afterlife of Objects (2002) and Natural History (2005).

‘Dan Chiasson has succeeded in writing the poetry many of 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

'Chiasson drank up all of Horace, and himself became one of the more unruly, more exciting, versions of Horation – essayistic, balanced, amicable, and yet dense, even coy, style in contemporary letters' – Stephen Burt, Times Literary Supplement

Dan Chiasson reads 'Hide and Seek'

Dan Chiasson reads his sequence 'Hide and Seek' from his new Bloodaxe collection Where's the Moon, There's the Moon. This is an extract from a longer film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce of Dan Chiasson reading a selection of poems from different books to be included in a future DVD-anthology from Bloodaxe. He was filmed at home in Sudbury, near Boston, Massachusetts, in September 2008.

North America: Knopf