Find Natural History Documented By Dan Chiasson Shown In Document

poem about the elephant "practicing" blew my mind, Thanks Mr. Chiasson for introducing me to Pliny, . . I browsed most of his writings after reading this book, Considering how much Roman poetry makes an appearance in this book, it's probably not a huge stretch to say that Chiasson's voice reminds me a lot of Horace.
But I say this in that good way, where Horace takes the common and everyday and social, and makes you feel his attitude toward it, this attitude that is so florid and enthusiastic just for the love of feeling.
I stumbled upon this book my accident, really a happy accident, it turns out, I got it via Book Mooch which I highly recommend sitelinkwww, bookmooch. com in lieu of a book by Charlie Smith that the owner couldn't find, To be honest, I wasn't even going to read this, as all of the previous poems by Dan Chiasson I've read didn't do much for me.
But once I started it I couldn't put it down, Natural History is really, really good, I am not in love with it, but I would say I have a crush, I especially like the way Chiasson writes in thend person, something I do a lot and something that doesn't always sit well with some readers or so has been my experience in workshops.
I personally like the implicit intimacy of a "you" in a poem and I think poems like "Love Song Sycamores"

do this very well:

I said, Stop there, but you followed me
even when I tore our bed to pieces,
I did that, I brought anger into the bower
and the sycamores became menacing shoulders.


I also love the poems about elephants, especially the bit about the elephant practicing his tricks at night in the dark an image that has haunted me for years though I couldn't recall where I'd read it.
I still can't recall, but perhaps it was in this very book, It's good to be haunted, I do recommend it. I'm glad, five years later, I revisited this poetry, and I'm unsurprised to find a mature and slyly humorous collectionno wonder it went over my head the first time around, a time when I was mostly stuffing my face with junk food poetics.
I am amazed at the cohabitation in these poems of irreverence and solemnity, I am also amazed at Chiasson's ability to inhabit ancient voices and craftily appropriate them for his purposes: he often knows exactly why he is drawn to certain writers, and also knows who he is as a writer, typically amalgamating the two with success.
The "Natural History" section is ferociously exact, melancholic and charming, From several angles, Chiasson is able to match the physical size of the elephant with suitably mountainous pathos, The final section balances ars poetica, narrative, and surrealism with circuslike dexteritythey're a chinful of plates that never so much as wobble, Hoorah. Checked this volume out of the library upon getting the wonderful sitelinkThe Sun in my inbox as the Poetry Foundation poem of the dayof the poems of the day are rubbish, but it's still worth subscribing for the.


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 toocleverbyhalfness 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.


Read most of this one in the barber's waiting for my haircut, A gorgeous collection of poems, Each was more marvelous than the next, dan chiasson does things that i could never do in ways that make language exciting, i like that his language is straightforward but his images and allusions are dark mirrorways into things you might not see otherwise, I read this for the first time years ago, maybe back in college, My best compliment is that so many little phrases from Chiassons poetry still rattle around in my head, The Guardian says it better than I ever could:
sitelink guardian. co. uk/books My favorite modern poet, Years later, lines will drift back to me, . . Whimsical, nonsequitur. Sex, drinking, profanity, references to pop culture, humor, How does earning a Ph, D. from Harvard embolden one's poetry Some playful moments, and some tired selfreferential moments, The freedom of freeverse talented but irritatingly selfinfatuated, want to love it, don't love it,

but it does many things that i want it to do, it just never lifts off I liked how selfreferential these poems were, . . Chiasson's references to himself were both touching and cheeky, They drew clearly on an individual's set of influences, and I enjoy tracing a poet's preoccupations, Dan Chiasson, hailed as “one of the most gifted poets of his generation” upon the appearance of his first book, takes inspiration for his stunning new collection from the Historia Naturalis of Pliny the Elder.
 

“What happens next, you wont believe,” Chiasson writes in “From the Life of Gorky,” and it is fair warning, This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wondersand equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known.
The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” “There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”, “The Elephant” “How to explain my heroic courtesy”, “The Pigeon” “Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”, and “Randall Jarrell” “If language hurts you, make the damage real”.
The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatureswho, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts.
Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest” a question this book seems poised to answer, But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings, Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.
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