Dan Chiasson’s The Afterlife of Objects and Rick Barot’s The Darker Fall both came out in October of 2002, and though neither has received a large number of print reviews, both seem to have garnered a fair amount of discussion and word-of-mouth praise. Why is it these two strong (and talked-about) debut collections haven’t received as much print attention as many other books from 2002? It’s not as if these authors came entirely out of nowhere–Barot had already won an NEA grant when The Darker Fall was published, and his poems had appeared in a range of high-profile journals; Chiasson also had an impressive list of publications and had been introduced in The New Yorker as a "Debut Poet." I’d like to think that all the reviewers out there just assumed someone else was already reviewing these author’s first collections–books such as these seem like obvious choices. But perhaps the real explanation lies in the divisions of American poetry–and the fact that these two books don’t quite fit into the critical systems that have been established by the two most outspoken groups.
          The first of these groups (all be they loose) includes those who advocate a revitalizing of postmodern-era poetry with Modernist aesthetic techniques, and the playful/disjunctive experimentation that accompanies such "revitalization." This group’s interest in a combination of abstruseness, post-Language poetics and irony sometimes earns criticisms of incoherence and meaninglessness. Such criticisms often come from the second group, which pretends that nothing has happened in American poetry since the late 1980’s (and perhaps for them nothing happened before the 60’s either). This second group writes–and almost exclusively discusses–post-confessional poems that find poetic "meaning" in the "truth" of the poet’s own life. Other, more loosely affiliated members of this group draw from the Deep Image poets, misinterpreting their poems as producing a sort of soft-core "spirituality" (as opposed to the real Deep Image focus on surrealism and psychology). Detractors dismiss this camp’s poems as sentimental, tone-deaf and anti-thought.
          By now, I’m sick of hearing these two groups duke it out. I don’t think a simple weighing of irony against earnestness, or difficulty against clarity, really engages the enduring elements of poetry. Indeed, the extremes of both camps seem absurdly unpoetic in the context of any history of poetry larger than the last thirty or forty years of American writing. And there are many interesting writers who find themselves landed by critics on one side or the other of this conversation–though more often than not these writers have slipped away from the extremes, toward where poetry seems to endure.
          Of course, I’m arguing for the importance of a middle ground–and there’s potentially a huge range here–where aspects of both camps are valued–both linguistic acuity and emotion, both difficulty and coherence. (After all, there’s a reason why these groups claim numerous poets in common as predecessors.) Today, there are many younger poets who are interestingly mining such middle territory. Barot and Chiasson are among them, as both poets are forcefully extending the boundaries of more mainstream poetic traditions without self-consciously attacking them. Because of this, I fear that our aforementioned first group might smirk at these poets as either overly earnest or "too easy" to be substantial, and yet the second group might find these same poets too difficult, strange or playful to warrant real attention. In my mind, the possibility of such two-front criticism is exactly what recommends Barot and Chiasson.
           Barot’s The Darker Fall, winner of Sarabande’s Kathryn A. Morton Prize for 2001, lands such high-brow artists and thinkers as Plato, Bonnard, Keats, Montale, Wittgenstein, Miró, Bishop, and Walter Benjamin in a mix of pop cultural references, such as Portishead, the Go-Go Girls, Grateful Dead t-shirts, gecko tattoos and Red Dog beer bottles. Yet, despite the potential dissonance of such a project, the book is actually one of quietude and subtlety, depicting from a variety of angles the speaker’s complex relationship with a late 20th century American landscape and culture-scape. One can feel the influence of Stevens on The Darker Fall, as well as Bishop and the imagistic clarity of Levis, but when Barot is at his best, he recombines these influences into legitimately new territory. Here, pop culture receives little of the ironic treatment of pop art–though neither is it celebrated for its surfaces. In fact, The Darker Fall is largely without overt judgments, choosing to investigate a sort of emotional empiricism that, for the sake of honesty, includes pop culture as part of the backdrop–one vector of the complex matrix the poet engages. This inclusiveness is to be admired in The Darker Fall; Barot is unafraid of either the classically poetic or the traditionally unpoetic, and he treats both with legitimate attention and affection.
          The book opens with the wonderful one-sentence poem, "Reading Plato," which apprehends the speaker’s emergence from innocence into a writer’s awareness of violence, Eros, and (for lack of a better term) the world of thinking. The poem begins as an urban landscape ("the hearts penknifed on the windows/ of the bus . . ./ . . ./ so many stalls of flowers/ and fruit going past, figures earnest with/ destination, even the city itself a heart"), but then the speaker reads Socrates’ description of "the lover’s wings spreading through the soul," and he immediately imagines this image’s inherent violence–"the back’s skin cracking/ to let each wing’s nub break through." Barot extends this meditation into the poem’s wonderful and surprising ending: "the blood on the feathers drying/ as you begin to sense the use for them." The speaker has come to realize the possibility of metaphoric flight–through love and knowledge–but he’s also become suddenly aware of writing; the same feathers that allow him to transcend his physical space also provide the quills for recording.
          This poem frames the Romantic element of Barot’s project–an unabashed desire for transcendence, tempered by a 20th century awareness of the real difficulty of such desire’s fulfillment. And yet, unlike so many of his contemporaries, Barot doesn’t give up. His poems keep trying to reach into the sublime, attempting multiple takes on their subjects so that the book has a prismatic, jazz-like quality. Indeed, many of the poems are composed of multiple sections, such as "Eight Elegies," "Bird Notes," "Blue Hours," "Passagework," "Ocean Park Notebook," "Portishead Notebook," and "Phantasmal Cities." These multiple sections reach repeatedly for the larger meanings of key moments and themes–sifting through "instants which turned to feeling,/ leaving the stubs and ash as their simple report." For Barot, the present so quickly slips into the past, where it floats like an abstract figure in a Miró painting, that it must be retrieved and examined, turned over and over again in the poet’s hand until the resulting words "fix [his] life/ to the rhythm of/ this day." In The Darker Fall, the presence of the sublime is often not fully apprehended until it’s already slipped past; such beauty touches the book’s characters as, in "Sublet, Pitt Street," ". . . the glance/ of light from the camera’s flash,/ touch[es] on each sleeper on the floor." Yet Barot is repeatedly aware of how language captures such moments, how in a "books’/ gnomic lines, the past keeps occurring."
         Dan Chiasson’s The Afterlife of Objects is in many ways a very different project from Barot’s meditative lyricism. Though both writers write quiet poems that engage a clearly American landscape, Chiasson tends to extend the Confessional/post-Confessional lineage into a quiet, fragmentary, and sometimes-meditative mode. Many of the poems in The Afterlife of Objects, could fall into the "slant narrative" category, but what distinguishes Chiasson’s book from many others is the diversity of approaches that he employs to address autobiographical and emotional intensity, as well as the subtle clarity, or strange near-silence, evidenced throughout the book. Ultimately, the result is that of a Confessional book, so carefully distilled that it has slipped into a separate register.
         On the one hand, Chiasson’s speaker wants to engage in straightforward recollections, such as in the opening poem, "Nocturne," where he claims, "I saved a man I swear, but afterward/ wherever I walked I saw one drown." But this desire is repeatedly tempered by the sad assessment: ". . . this late at night our words/ can’t count. Not even these words count." Later, in the poem "Stealing from Your Mother," Chiasson goes on to remind himself, "You know you know/ what you did. No one is hearing your ornate confession." Since the effectiveness of straight confession is hereby thrown into question as a form of poetic expiation, the speaker tries to reach beyond mere autobiography into a larger understanding of the issues at play–trying to fit the speaker’s individual story into the contexts of archetypes (as again in "Nocturne," where "Other and Other made a ladder and up/ to the top I climbed and saw America"), or else by reaching beyond the individual perspective (as in "’The Sensible present Has Duration,’" where the speaker addresses a litany of objects in an attempt to escape the confining self). In the end, the intended effect of these attempts at is that of watching "a man trying/ to steady an aquarium on his bent knee, nearly// impossible to carry,/ lose his// grip and fish and glass [go] everywhere."
         With Chiasson, it’s finally the attempt at recording and/or saying that holds real Pathos. Sometimes a larger analysis of a situation fails, and the speaker must resort to spare image and flat statement, as in the end of "Visit," where "Seeing him// die was like seeing a boy/ inflate a sandwich bag// with breath, then empty it./ . . ./ I stayed a week, and// when he wasn’t dying/ anymore, I went away." Other times, a complex metaphorical thinking allows the speaker to explain his relationships with family and landscape, as when in a dream the speaker becomes his mother’s shovel, and "her ache from planting/ was/ my presence in her life." When Chiasson is at his best, he’s able to accurately name emotions and familiar situations in complex, surprising and moving ways. Which is important, given the speed with which time passes in the postmodern world (a view Chiasson seems to shares with Barot)–a world where deer "stare at each other and wander/ bewildered down my ravine and turn into skeletons."