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The Math Campers by Dan Chiasson    {Reviewed by THOMAS} where the poet writes or wrote it was impossible to say it is impossible to say where faraway was or why the reader writes “it was impossible to say it is impossible to say where faraway was or why” to remember the words or avoid remembering but where the poet writes It may just be my mind, he thought. It may just be my mind. He wrote: “It may just be my mind.” how can the reader write or rewrite that  he thought  who never claimed to be a poet maybe once how can I write  or rewrite all those wrotes within wrotes, nests within nests here the poet the reader thought writes  or wrote about the writing of the poems he wrote or is writing or soon will either write  or not the poem of how the poem is made or will be made or is then being made  or could be made or not in some room of the poet’s mind or on some paper  less likely or in the house of a dead poet more precisely literally On the upstairs deck, I read about               The deck upstairs. In the daybed I read about the daybed. In the books               I read about the books I read. the poet wrote the reader wrote  or rewrote sharing the labour  each expected of the other with the other their separation more a distance of time than a distance of person not that each is one person only the moments flicker because time as the poet’s past is the same age as his sons  as the reader knows the poet knows each is not one person only He turned to meet me, but our element was time. He approached me, where I was standing, years later; and I approached him where he stood, but he was too far in the past. the pages turn the poems turn or turn again the poet is carefully squeezed out of the poem or squeezed in the poem changed slightly, crucially—                because, you know why, because time this slow precise perfecting process as the poet writes as the reader reads unlike these lines tossed off if that is how to put it in less than a minute and unrevisited the reader can do no justice to the form but to be fair made no such claims  in that direction towards the province of the poet he thinks I had no real name. I was the channel through which the mind passed, and then I was a gap, an absence, which frightened me. again this space this wound in time this crack where the words get in or out this rift between the poet and his past if only a moment passed between poet and poem which is to say the poet who breathes and stumbles and the one squeezed out of the poem or in from sleep to type We were held, suspended within the larger dream; we alternate coming into, then stepping out of, the light. the poet wrote the reader wrote if that makes sense then the world wakes up, enlarged— there is not nor can there be anything more than this