Epic yet intimate, Dan Chiasson's fourth poetry collection evokes Milton and Blake with its nuanced states of innocence and experience. The title poem depicts Chiasson as a five-year-old boy, hoisted onto his neighbor's shoulders to watch the 1976 bicentennial festivities in Boston. From this vantage point, he imagines seeing his absentee father--who fled to South Korea with a new wife and a Taiwanese reggae band--dancing down the street "with his brand-new family." In "One on One," the poet cheekily chides this father, who also trekked to Alaska to teach English to the Inuits: "The choice is to stick around on a slender chance/ a person's son turns into a canonical writer./ The point is not to shiver on the horizon/ And correct an Inuit's prepositions."
While Chiasson's questing father represents the unreliable past, the unrevealed future can be comforting. The poet, now also a father, tells his children, "All of history, even the Romans/ they happen later, tonight sleep tight." Although Chiasson claims he never knew his father, the older man's features "idle inside/ And thicken my sons' cheekbones."
In "Star Catcher," the poet's reference to Thurman Munson--the New York Yankees player who died in 1979 while practicing landing his Cessna--brings to mind the myth of Icarus and Daedalus. Throughout, Chiasson's main motif is the Ferris wheel; like Yeats's widening gyre, it spins forward and backward in time. Bicentennial is both tragic and comic, exploring the tension between past and present, tradition and progress, colonization and independence. --Thuy Dinh, editor, Da Mau magazine