The first in a new series in which people share what they’re reading and recommending this summer.

Dan Chiasson is a poet and critic as well as an old pal of Tingle Alley’s. His (phenomenal) first book of poems is The Afterlife of Objects. His next, Natural History, is forthcoming from Knopf in fall of 2005.

The first thing everyone must read this summer is Frank Bidart’s book Star Dust. Very few works of art give the feeling of permanence on a first or second reading, but this one does. Very few books of poems compel and enthrall by such a variety of means, including shock (there is a passage in the long poem from the volume, “The Third Hour of the Night,” that is perhaps the single most disturbing thing I have ever read); abstract thought (about art and artifacts, about the workings of desire, about poetry and its use and misuse, and centrally about the human drive to make); tenderness (the ferocious heart at the center of this book is also very naked and vulnerable); lyricism (read the title poem, among the most sumptuous lyric poems you’ll read)… I could go on. I’m reading other things this summer: Michael Schmidt’s wonderful The First Poets about nearly forgotten ancient Greek lyric poets; David Ferry’s Georgics; and the galleys of a new book on Henry Adams by Gary Wills. But the Bidart book is the main thing. If I had the money, I would buy it for you.

RELATED:
• Adam Travis interviewed Frank Bidart for the June issue of Bookslut.
• Read “The Third Hour of the Night.”
• Read a selection of Bidart’s earlier poems here.