Dan Chiasson’s "Bicentennial" is a wonderful meditation on boyhood, memory, history, and time. The book opens with a game of “alternate basketball nobody plays,/ Both players try to tie the score:/ That way, at the buzzer, the game isn’t over.” Thus begins a journey in which past and present blur together as the speaker considers the importance of fatherhood and his own childhood in 1970s Vermont, which was profoundly shaped by the absence of the father he never knew.
Chiasson’s writing is accessible yet rich as he transforms simple memories – such as playing touch football – into something deeper. The collection is tinged by elegy as it builds toward the long title poem in which the speaker recalls the nation’s Bicentennial he attended as a child. That event becomes a springboard for reflections about the past, community, and parenting. The poem could collapse into regret, but instead it opens in unexpected ways, as when the clear-eyed speaker reminds his sons, “You are having your childhood, now.”
