Beatitudes.

Beatitudes begins with an epigraph from St. Matthew—“Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth”—thereby opening the space for his poetic hermeneutic. Like the late Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry is grounded in the corporeal and temporal aspects of being and explores both the human condition and the metaphysical, Chiasson invites the reader to reflect on the complex and intersecting notions of humanity and transcendence. That “we are lost along the way,” “the scrap of / a half lived life … / makes paradise appear probable and perplexing.”

Omitting the “blessed are” of the scriptural Beatitudes and commencing each phrase with “those who,” Chiasson captures glimpses of the particularities of life that are recognizable and universal. The “meek” are “those who … candidly admit the poverty of their lives, the inadequacies of their heart, the / obligations of an everyday life exhausted by overcoming / that which cannot be overcome, a childhood by default ….” Poetic tension abounds as Chiasson presses against traditional notions of the “meek” to include “those who imagine themselves to be prosperous and important.” In lines that soar, “they, too, will take flight towards heaven, lifting the / burden of a bitterness that had planted them like stakes / into the ground of their own histories ….” Within the long poem are affecting vignettes about those “who empty their closets” and “who return empty-handed having missed the target of their desire”; or “those who have flowers inscribed on their skin, / imagining an entire garden in the point of the needle.” Sections culminate with interpretations of heaven and with a comma, as both form and content comprise Chiasson’s meditation of the ongoing journey there, along a common path that is “tortuous and tangled.”

Milosz wrote that a poet’s work stood against nihilism and for being. George Steiner viewed poetry as the literary engendering of transcendence. In Beatitudes we contemplate the metaphors and the concepts of humanity and transcendence. While at times lines are ambiguous or purposefully prosaic, phrases and sections ring profoundly clear, resounding in the mind long afterward.