Where's the Moon, There's the Moon

These are powerfully original poems about the sweetness and pain of adulthood and fatherhood by the critically acclaimed poet Dan Chiasson. A child's improvised game of "Where's the moon, There's the moon" is the shaping metaphor for this collection, but adult matters of seeking and finding, loss and recovery, anticipation and desire's uncertain rewards are at its heart. Chiasson makes poignant use of objects and nature's givens as correlatives for our human struggles: "Being near me never made anyone a needle," he writes in "Thread," and in the poem titled "Tree," "All day I waited to be blown; / then someone cut me down." In the title sequence, a multipart poem about fathers and sons, Chiasson describes the ways the gift for being absent, a poet's gift, is passed from father to son, as he watches his own children sink into the enigmatic silences that mimic his ownsilences that he, in turn, connects with his own father's disappearance from his life. Chiasson is a poet of great grief and love. In this third book, his voice is more commanding than ever, embracing the notion of how smallyet how rich and significantare our individual stories in time and space. From the Hardcover edition.

Dan Chiasson, a poetry editor at The Paris Review and the recipient of numerous awards, is the author of two previous collections of poetry and a book of criticism. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Sherborn, Massachusetts.