Where's the Moon, There's the Moon

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., 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.

Dan Chiasson was born in Burlington, Vermont, and educated at Amherst College and Harvard University, where he completed a PhD in English. A widely published literary critic, Chiasson is a regular reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, poetry editor of the Paris Review, and has published a critical study, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America, with the University of Chicago Press in 2007. His Bloodaxe selection Natural History and other poems (2006) drew on two collections published in the US, The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). This was followed by Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, US / Bloodaxe Books, UK, 2010), Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) and The Math Campers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry, a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and teaches at Wellesley College. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.