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Article: Natural History.(Eight Takes)(Book review)
- Article from:
- Poetry
- Article date:
- March 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Modern Poetry Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Natural History, by Dan Chiasson. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.00.
Chiasson's first book, The Afterlife of Objects (2002), was confessional in its ancestry but already well-differentiated. Natural History is similar, but makes some effort to permute the formula, pairing speech acts with mismatched affects to produce a result that is slightly programmatic, but fresh and not heavy. Ira love song, then sheepishly; if a pastoral, then ironically; if a romance, then resignedly. You learn quickly that everything Chiasson utters is figurative first and literal second, or not literal at all: a poem about elephants is about everything but elephants. As the layers of indirection ...