The Afterlife of Objects (Phoenix Poets) [Paperback]

Dan Chiasson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0226103781 | ISBN-13: 978-0226103785 | Edition: 1

Both intensely personal and deeply rooted in recognizable events of personal, familial, or national significance, The Afterlife of Objects is a kind of dreamed autobiography. With poise and skill, Dan Chiasson divulges the enigmas of the mind of not just one individual but of an entire social world through a beautifully constructed poetic voice that issues from a kind of mythic childhood of our collective, tortured humanity. This sophisticated debut collection offers deceptively simple poems that evoke highly complex states of mind with a voice that has long been listening to the discordant music of contemporary life.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The Phoenix Poets list contains a number of poets currently on my list of favorites. This is a strong, vital series which has given voice to some of the best voices in American poetry today." - Billy Collins "Dan Chiasson has succeeded in writing the poetry many in 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." - Robert Pinsky

From the Inside Flap

Both intensely personal and rooted in recognizable events of American life, The Afterlife of Objects is a kind of dreamed autobiography. The enigmas of an individual mind become, in Dan Chiasson's poems, puzzles with wider social and historical significance. This sophisticated debut collection asks us to imagine our selves back into real life, evoking highly lyrical and pitched to the discordant music of contemporary life. Chiasson's poems provide one of the most poised and searching answers yet to Ralph Waldo Emerson's question, "Where do we find ourselves?"

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Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (October 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226103781
• ISBN-13: 978-0226103785
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,833,813 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended, August 8, 2003

By 

Robert E. Witwer (Golden, CO United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Afterlife of Objects (Phoenix Poets) (Paperback)

Dan's poems are richly imagined and beautifully written. "Leverett Circle" stands out as a touching and deeply humane masterpiece. Check it out: http://www.poems.com/leverchi.htm.

14 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Lacking something, September 13, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Afterlife of Objects (Phoenix Poets) (Paperback)

This poet has a firm grasp of poetic technique, but needs something more powerful to accompany it. (It's the same problem that plagued Pinsky's first book. Still, he grew out of it, and maybe Chaisson will, too.)

1 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Totally Poetic Poet, August 18, 2007

By 

B. R. Cole "BRC" (China) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Afterlife of Objects (Phoenix Poets) (Paperback)

I didn't want to waste my time finding another email address for this pathetic author because his latest review in the NY TIMES about the G Bay detainees was embarrassing. His logic/legal reasoning was wrong and he wasn't really reviewing a book of poetry, he was expressing his own (I would argue extreme) views. Maybe he should put the poetry in context instead of being a human rights activist.

"You don't read this book for pleasure, you read it for evidence."

Very pathetic. Again---he should be embarrassed-- and reprimanded.

Just read below and it becomes obvious:

"This short book prints 22 poems by detainees at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that have been cleared for release by the United States military. The poems -- some by accomplished writers, others by first-time poets -- suffer "some flaws," as the book's editor, Marc Falkoff, himself a lawyer for 17 detainees, puts it. It is hard to imagine a reader so hardhearted as to bring aesthetic judgment to bear on a book written by men in prison without legal recourse, several of them held in solitary confinement, some of them likely subjected to practices that many disinterested parties have called torture. You don't read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence. And if you are an American citizen you read it for evidence of the violence your government is doing to total strangers in a distant place, some of whom (perhaps all of whom, since without due process how are we to tell?) are as innocent of crimes against our nation as you are.

Skip to next paragraph
POEMS FROM GUANTÁNAMO

The Detainees Speak.

Edited by Marc Falkoff.

72 pp. University of Iowa Press. $13.95.
All of which is to say, reading "Poems From Guantánamo" is a bizarre experience. "The Detainees Speak" is this book's subtitle: but putting aside the real question of whether lyric poets ever "speak" through their art, in the sense of revealing a historical person's actual life story (they have rarely done so through poetry's long history, and often poets "speak" least revealingly precisely when they claim to be telling the truth), in what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by "linguists with secret-level security clearance" but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale -- "speak"?

Given these constraints, a better subtitle might have been "The Detainees Do Not Speak" or perhaps "The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak." But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been "The Pentagon Speaks." To be sure, it's hard to imagine a straightforward propagandistic use for the lines "America sucks, America chills, / While d' blood of d' Muslims is forever getting spilled"; but you can't help suspecting that this entire production is some kind of public relations psych-out, "proof" that dissent thrives even in the cells of Guantánamo. (Does that sound paranoid? Can you think of another good reason the Pentagon would have selected these lines out of thousands for publication?)

You have to be in the mood for some death-defying Orwellian back-flips, then, to read "Poems From Guantánamo." When Martin Mubanga, an "athletic kickboxer" and a "citizen of both the United Kingdom and Zambia" (the poems come with extensive biographical notes, often more evocative than the poems themselves) refers to "hard-core detainees like you an' me" -- is this a case of the Pentagon's missing the irony or, more likely, has the Pentagon deemed that analogy so absurd as to reveal a dangerous criminal mind-set? Since the poem, written in an absurd ersatz-gangsta patois, possesses exactly zero literary interest, what is a reader to do besides try to locate the governmental cunning in clearing it for publication?

But the bulk of these poems are so vague, their claims so conventional, that they might have been written at any point in history by anyone suffering anything. "What kind of spring is this, / Where there are no flowers and / The air is filled with a miserable smell?" Even though these lines were, we are told, carved into a Styrofoam cup (the detainees were for a time denied pen and paper), they mimic the kinds of things sad or frustrated people have always written. But surely being imprisoned in Guantánamo rises to a level of wretchedness beyond mere sadness or frustration. When Sami Al Haj, a detainee whose biography says he was "tortured at both Bagram Air Base and Kandahar" before ending up at Guantánamo, writes that "hot tears covered my face," he sounds like a teenage sonneteer, not the victim of nearly unimaginable physical cruelty. Such are the unfortunate diminishing returns of poetic figuration, which, except in extraordinary cases, blunts where it purports to sharpen, blurs where it promised focus.

The effect of this volume is therefore curiously to make Guantánamo and our abuses there unfold on an abstract "literary" plane rather than in real life and real time. That's too bad, since Falkoff and the other lawyers behind this project have acted in enormous good faith and some day will be recognized for their legal work as national heroes. But imagine a volume of Osip Mandelstam's poetry released by the Soviet government in 1938, or an anthology of poems by Japanese internment prisoners released by our government during the Second World War. The government's disingenuous resistance to this book's publication aside (a wooden official statement denounces the book as "another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies"), the Pentagon ought to get an editor's credit on "Poems From Guantánamo."

Dan Chiasson is the author of three books, most recently "One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America," a volume of essays. He teaches at Wellesley College.