Frank Bidart Books

Not having read Robert Lowell's poems previously, I was delighted with their acessiblity and being a Boston area resident, I enjoyed their local references. I think I had hesitated to read another "confessional" poet having had my fill of Plath, but Lowell is very different and poem after poem pleased me.

A great collected poems by one of America's masterful minor poets. Much to see and enjoy. Great for any poet who wishes to apprentice himself to someone with a subtle and sophistaced understanding of the English language and a wide and nuanced emotional range. Sturdy hardback volume. Will last an entire lifetime.

I believe that Lowell's work is best viewed through this expansive collection. No single book of his poetry truly captures the full breadth of his literary accomplishments. Of course, if you're only looking for an introduction to his work, Life Studies or For the Union Dead would probably do.

But if you really want to understand the full scope of his talent, then this book is indispensable. I would even go so far as to say that this book will probably cement Lowell's place among America's finest poets in years to come.

I studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard in 1963 & 1964. I wouldn't presume to review his Collected Poems, only to testify that he was a giant of a human -- witty, sensitive even toward brash young would-be poets, immensely knowledgeable, immensely conscientious. Having known him remains one of the great privileges of my life. Reading his poems is a great privilege for all of us.

The publication of this book was doubtless necessary to begin understanding Lowell correctly. Creator and destroyer, careful wordsmith and subversive deconstructor, encountering just one of his volumes along the strange parabola of his career can be confusing. Lowell always set out to carefully craft each of them, with special attention to the arrangement of his resonant poems and their slow, grand, building cumulative effect. To let you know the game, Lowell presented almost each of his volumes with an evocative frontpiece engraving by Francis Parkman -- the poet thus visually setting forth each of his works, in advance of his death, as another controlled chess move against the great opponent Fame -- the act of a control fanatic if there ever was one.

Yet somewhere in the middle of Lowell's career of creating the little volumes, more violently toward the end of his years as diseases took over, the mad Doppleganger Cal (Lowell's nickname to his insider pals) enters, seeds the serene clouds with fury, and all hell breaks loose. At worst, all is botched: mere beautiful poetic scraps, a line or two amongst literary gossip for insiders, yesterday's obnoxious news. In hindsight Cal indeed did a pretty good job; it is easier to just turn away from the mess. But Lowell is so good at his best, so earnest even in his madness, that we are going to miss something significant about our own history -- the subject which most deeply concerned him -- if we do. And finally, even at his worst, there is always something very endearing about this voice, something very human and honest. Lowell was plagued with true and furious organic disorders which disrupted his personality; his issues were not only self-inflicted. In an earlier age he would not have lived out the length of career he did; in significant ways, then, his voice is a truly new one on the block. Unfortunately for him, the hyped up madness of his period identified with his genuine madness and made a pathetic celebrity of him, which didn't help the brave and fragile personality struggling to make poetic sense of a disturbed time.

Bidart has picked up the pieces and presented Lowell as one, that's all, in all his exasperating wholeness. Now it is easier to see that Lowell and Cal were one, that the lasting work of worth emerges from their furious wrestling. Over time he was many kinds of a writer and a poet, and certainly not all of them will last. He left some absolute foolishness he only got away with because of his name and the looniness at large which seized on him about the same time it seized on Batman and Laugh-In -- junk like the plays in the Old Glory. But when you remember that this was a truly sick man and not just another boozed out writer, you wonder at the absolute clarity of the best work, and the occasional glimmers which never entirely disappeared. Doubtless much later, a generation free of the diseases we still to a degree share with this poet will make the appropriate selection. In the meantime, in a real sense, the record Bidart has compiled shows that the bell tolls for us, too.

I wish Bidart were more prolific, but on the bright side, each rare collection is an irresistible distillation of some thought-elixir. "Music Like Dirt" treats how humans are essentially art-making, art-sharing creatures. Since this is Bidart, we get both the good and evil consequences of this impulse - the grotesques along with the geniuses - in language that is simple, clear, but also finely wrought and deeply emotional.

Note that this is a chapbook, so even though it's beautifully printed it still has something of a flimsy feeling... It's perfectly sized and shaped to be a little gift to the favorite creative or artistic person in your life.

The real standouts in the collection, "For the Twentieth Century," "Advice to the Players," and "Lament for the Makers," are all available online, albeit coarsened by lousy layout and banner ads. Don't just read them quickly at your desk; print them out and read them somewhere peaceful in solitude, and you will probably end up wanting to buy the book anyway, they're that good.

This is a simply extraordinary collection of poems by Frank Bidart, who is quickly becoming recognized, alongside Louise Glück, as an influential master in contemporary poetry. This book can perhaps be best understood as a companion, rather than a standalone collection: it is best to have an understanding of Bidart's style and work from, say, _In the Western Night_ and _Star Dust_ than it is to start reading him with this book.

He makes his intent clear in the end of Under Julian, C362 A.D. that "the fewer the gestures that can, in the future,/ be, the sweeter those left to you to make." It seems, given this perspective, that the title, _Watching the Spring Festival_, suggests a spring that has come, whereas this book really remains steeped in an autumn of sorts. Each of these poems, in some way, explores death and mortality, and many of them look back, whether to earlier poems in this volume (there is a large degree of self-referentiality, and the poem Watching the Spring Festival, late in the book, forces the translation Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake to be reread), to Bidart's earlier volumes (there is a new translation of Catullus' Odi et Amo that perhaps needs a rereading of the translation in _Desire_ to make sense), to those of his mentor, Robert Lowell (Like Lightning Across an Open Field takes from Lowell's The Days in _Day by Day_), and to the early forms that originally constituted poetry (If See No End In Is acts as a wonderful update of the sestina form, with the envoi suggestively gone).

A number of Bidart's readers have complained that, although _Star Dust_ was well-executed, they missed the dominant typography that characterized his earlier books. Bidart has returned to his experimental mode, especially in Hymn and Song, rarely eschewing his trademark rhythm of couplets alternated with single-line stanzas. And, although there is no Fourth Hour of the Night here (can that be expected before Bidart dies?), the longer poems are wonderful: Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before the Camera Giselle is every bit as mysterious and iconoclastic as Ellen West and The War of Vaslav Nijinsky have been, while Collector is an entirely new direction for Bidart. This poem, set from the rest by several blank pages, moves away from the death-motif of the text and looks ahead, telling the reader that "The rituals/ you love imply that, repeating them,// you store seeds that promise// the end of ritual." Here is the spring that the reader has anticipated, but has not been able to watch.

All in all, this book absolutely lived up to my expectations and certainly will help to affirm Bidart's place in the canon of contemporary poetry. I absolutely recommend it, especially for those who have already read some of Frank Bidart's other work.

Perhaps you are reading these reviews because, let us be honest, you are a bit intimidated to read a book of this nature. Written over seven centuries ago, many, perhaps even most, of the references are today obscure. Yes, the scholars can read Dante, but what of you, who just wants something deeper, who recognizes that you should fill your head with something a bit more permanent than the latest best seller? You still want something accessible and understandable. To you I say...you should plunge ahead and read THE INFERNO OF DANTE. It is fantastic.

I am no expert on the time period reflected in THE INFERNO. And I remember nothing about any poetry class I ever took. I cannot even say whether Pinsky did a good job of translating Dante into English. I can only comment on the pages that are in front of me, and they are extremely enjoyable. Dante himself sought to make THE INFERNO accessible to the masses. He wrote it in Italian rather than Latin for exactly that reason and this translation remains true to that end.

As most are aware, THE INFERNO takes us through the circles of Hell, deeper and deeper into the abyss. THE INFERNO's descriptions are excellent, grabbing the reader's attention as the sins become more and more serious the deeper we go, with the eternal punishments meted out becoming more and more severe. Although many references are now obscure, the notes for the book provide an excellent context that allows one to follow along. I personally was concerned that I would be spending too much time with the endnotes to really enjoy the text. But the two really complement each other very well, making the book that much more enjoyable.

We learn a great deal along the way. In limbo, for instance, Dante encounters many souls worthy of salvation, but which are doomed to limbo, as they were born before Christ provided that salvation to man. Interestingly, although most Muslims are later found deeper in hell with the heretics, several notable Muslims are here, evidencing at least a grudging appreciation on the part of the deeply Chritian Dante for the damned of a non-Christian religion.

Following that same theme, the founder of Islam himself, Mohammed, is further down still than the heretics. Following the belief that Mohammed was a fallen Catholic cardinal, he is with the schismatics, who broke from the one true church to lead others onto a false path. Eternally split open from head to tailbone only to heal up for another round of the same, his torture perfectly symbolizes his sin.

Of course, I use the above merely as examples. THE INFERNO is rife with others, each as readable as they are gruesome. Contrary to my own initial concerns, I found THE INFERNO OF DANTE very much worth the time and I recommend it without hesitation.

Even though the Inferno is not intended to be an analysis of the philosophy of sins, but rather an implementation of Christian doctrines, Dante did not miss the opportunity to enhance his glory at the expense of his sinner rivals. A sinner's punishment was proportional to their sin, but the degree of evil associated with each sin was defined by Dante's own moral system. It was interesting to note that he considered murder less evil than fraud. Another interesting point was that it was necessary for Dante and Virgil to stop at the river of forgetfulness before getting out of Hell.

The intention of the journey was in one way or another to find Beatrice, the love that Dante lost early on earth and was hoping to meet in heaven. Most likely, the Divine Comedy wouldn't have seen the light of day if Dante had married Beatrice.

Nice poem, Dante's ego gets out of control at some points, but that can be forgiven, given the artistic work he created.

[...] I recall Robert Pinsky, in the Note to his English translation of Dante's Inferno, humbly hoping to bring to the modern reader the vernacular musicality of that Medieval poet. "Improvised and imperfect at every point," Pinsky writes about his splendid attempt, his essay at renewal, "but pushing on: trying to turn the wheel surely enough to accomplish what work it can" [...] --from "Recollections"

This was required reading for a graduate course in medieval history.
Dante Alighieri's (1265-1321) "Devine Comedy" weaved together aspects of biblical and classical Greek literary traditions to produce one of the most important works of not only medieval literature, but also one of the great literary works of Western civilization. The full impact of this 14,000-line poem divided into 100 cantos and three books is not just literary. Dante's autobiographical poem Commedia, as he titled it, was his look into the individual psyche and human soul. He explored and reflected on such fundamental questions as political institutions and their problems, the nature of humankind's moral actions, and the possibility of spiritual transformation; these were all fundamental social and cultural concerns for people during the fourteenth-century. Dante wrote the Commedia not in Latin but in the Tuscan dialect of Italian so that it would reach a broader readership. The Commedia was a three-part journey undertaken by the pilgrim Dante to the realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, (Inferno), Purgatory, (Purgatorio), and Paradise, (Paradisio).

The poem narrated in first person, began with Dante lost midlife. He was 35 years old in the year 1300 and in a dark wood. Being lost in the dark wood was certainly an allegorical device that Dante used to express the condition of his own life at the time he started writing the poem. Dante had been active in Florentine politics and a member of the White Guelph party who opposed the secular rule of Pope Boniface VIII over Florence. In 1302, The Black Guelphs who were allied with the Pope, were militarily victorious in gaining control of the city and Dante found himself an exile from his beloved city for the rest of his life. Thus, Dante started writing the Commedia in 1308 and used it to comment on his own tribulations of life, and to state his views on politics and religion, and heap scorn on his political enemies.

Dante's first leg of his journey out of the dark wood was through the nine concentric circles of Hell (Inferno), escorted by his favorite classical Roman poet Virgil, author of the Aeneid. Dante borrowed heavily from Virgil's Aeneid. Much of Dante's description of hell had similarities to Virgil's description in his sixth book of the Aeneid. Dante's three major divisions of sin in hell where unrepentant sinners dwelled, had their sources in Aristotle and Augustinian philosophy. They were self-indulgence, violence, and fraud. Fraud was considered the worst of moral failures because it undermined family, trust, and religion; in essence, it tore at the moral fabric of civilized society. These divisions were inversions of the classical virtues of moderation, courage, and wisdom. The fourth classical virtue, justice, is what Dante came to believe after his journey through hell that all its inhabitants received for their unrepentant sins. There were nine concentric circles of hell inside the earth; each smaller than the previous one. For Dante the geography of hell was a moral geography as well as a physical one, reflecting the nature of the sin. Canto IV describes the first circle of hell, Limbo, which is where Dante met the shades, as souls where called, of the virtuous un-baptized such as Homer, Ovid, Caesar, Aristotle, and Plato.

In the four circles for the sin of self-indulgence Dante met shades who where lustful, gluttons, hoarders and wrathful. In the second circle of Hell, lustful souls were blown around in a violent storm. In Canto V, one of the great dramatic moments of the poem, Dante had his first lengthy encounter with an unrepentant sinner Francesca da Rimini, who committed adultery with her brother-in-law. Like all the sinners in hell, Francesca laid the blame for her sin elsewhere. She claimed to be seduced into committing adultery after reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. At the end of the scene, Dante fainted out of pity for Francesca.

In Canto X, the sixth circle of hell reserved for heretics who are punished by being trapped in flaming tombs, Dante took the opportunity to use the circle to chastise political leaders for participating in political partisanship. A Florentine who was a leader in the rival Ghibbelline political party, Farinata degli Uberti, accosted Dante. Both men aggressively argued with each other, recreating in hell the bitterness of partisan politics in Florence. Farinata predicted Dante's exile. Dante used this Canto to show the dangerous tendencies of petty political partisanship that he harbored.

The seventh circle of hell was subdivided into three areas where sinners were punished for doing violence against themselves, their neighbors, or God. In Canto XIII Dante encountered Pier della Vigne in the wood of the suicides. The shades there were shrubs who had to speak through a broken branch. Pier spoke to Dante about how he had been an important advisor to Emperor Frederick II, and how he blamed his fall, and his suicide, on the envy of other court members. This Canto was especially important because Dante came to grips with his own "future" fall from political power and exile. Pier's behavior served as a strong example to Dante how not to act in exile. Whether he had been tempted to commit suicide is not clear; however, he certainly had been prone to the selfish and despairing attitude that Pier represented.

The last two circles of hell contained the sinners of fraud. In the eighth circle, there were ten ditches for the various types of fraud such as Simony, thievery, hypocrisy, etc. Canto XIX described the third ditch, which contained those guilty of Simony, the sin of church leaders perverting their spiritual office by buying and selling church offices. Simonists were buried upside down in a rock with their feet on fire. Pope Nicholas III mistakenly addressed Dante as Pope Boniface VIII who was the current Pope in 1300, and whose place in hell was thereby predicted. This is not surprising since Boniface was the person most responsible for Dante's exile. In an interesting literary twist, Nicholas "confessed" to Dante, as if he was a priest, his sin of greed and nepotism. He admitted that even after becoming Pope he cared more for his family's interests than the good of the whole Church. Dante responded to Nicholas' "confession" with a stinging condemnation of Simony drawn from the Book of Revelation. After this encounter, Dante came to understand that hell was a place of justice.

Canto XXXIV, the last one in the Inferno, depicted Satan with three heads. Each head was chewing the three worst sinners of humankind. The middle head was chewing on the head of Judas Iscariot, who was a disciple to Jesus and his betrayer. The other two heads were chewing Brutus and Cassius; the murderers of Julius Caesar, and the two men Dante faulted for the destruction of a unified Italy. Dante considered the two ultimate betrayals against God and against the empire as the worst betrayals perpetrated in the history of humankind.

Thus, Dante's intent in his Commedia was to teach fourteenth-century readers that if one wanted to ascend spiritually towards God then one needed to learn the nature of sin from the unrepentant. By doing this, one could learn to overcome the same tendencies found in themselves. He wanted people to realize what he had come to learn that political partisanship would only stand in the way of unifying Italy and keep it from regaining any of its former glory that it enjoyed during the time of the Roman Empire.

Recommended reading for anyone interested in literature and medieval history.

"Midway life's journey I was made aware/that I had strayed into a dark forest..." Those eerie words open the first cantica of Dante Alighieri's "Inferno," the most famous part of the legendary Divina Comedia. But the stuff going on here is anything but divine, as Dante explores the metaphorical and supernatural horrors of the inferno.

The date is Good Friday of the year 1300, and Dante is lost in a creepy dark forest, being assaulted by a trio of beasts who symbolize his own sins. But suddenly he is rescued ("Not man; man I once was") by the legendary poet Virgil, who takes the despondent Dante under his wing -- and down into Hell.

But this isn't a straightforward hell of flames and dancing devils. Instead, it's a multi-tiered carnival of horrors, where different sins are punished with different means. Opportunists are forever stung by insects, the lustful are trapped in a storm, the greedy are forced to battle against each other, and the violent lie in a river of boiling blood, are transformed into thorn bushes, and are trapped on a volcanic desert.

If nothing else makes you feel like being good, then "The Inferno" might change your mind. The author loads up his "Inferno" with every kind of disgusting, grotesque punishment that you can imagine -- and it's all wrapped up in an allegorical journey of humankind's redemption, not to mention dissing the politics of Italy and Florence.

Along with Virgil -- author of the "Aeneid" -- Dante peppered his Inferno with Greek myth and symbolism. Like the Greek underworld, different punishments await different sins; what's more, there are also appearances by harpies, centaurs, Cerberus and the god Pluto. But the sinners are mostly Dante's contemporaries, from corrupt popes to soldiers.

And Dante's skill as a writer can't be denied -- the grotesque punishments are enough to make your skin crawl ("Fixed in the slime, groan they, 'We were sullen and wroth...'"), and the grand finale is Satan himself, with legendary traitors Brutus, Cassius and Judas sitting in his mouths. (Yes, I said MOUTHS, not "mouth")

More impressive still is his ability to weave the poetry out of symbolism and allegory, without it ever seeming preachy or annoying. Even pre-hell, we have a lion, a leopard and a wolf, which symbolize different sins, and a dark forest that indicates suicidal thoughts. And the punishments themselves usually reflect the person's flaws, such as false prophets having their heads twisted around so they can only see what's behind them. Wicked sense of humor.

Dante's vivid writing and wildly imaginative "inferno" makes this the most fascinating, compelling volume of the Divine Comedy. Never fun, but always spellbinding and complicated.

Sometimes I am reluctant to write reviews of the poetry I read. This is certainly a time when I was. I am certainly not a poet who has the reknown or the publication history of Frank Bidart but I do still have an opinion.

Reading _Star Dust_ was difficult. Not only is the poetry in a very academic style, but the poems are also replete w/ allusions to music and art. If these poems were in a school anthology there would have been a plethora of endnotes. We, however, were not given the help of that so I found other ways to discern what Bidart's references were all about.

I can see the skill of Frank Bidart. He is well educated and has an amazing ability to make his poems reflect upon each other as is best apparent with the final poem and how it relates to the earlier poems in the collection.

All this good and bad being said, for me, this isn't a book I would read again. I don't mind being challenged but I came away from this collection feeling that I was just being challenged because the poet was capable of doing so. This is not a collection I would read again.

I would say, however, that if you are looking for a good challenge-a puzzle-then sit with google and a marker and just see the layers that Bidart is capable of. It can be an adventure.

I have very little doubt that Frank Bidart is a
major American poet. What do I mean by that? I mean
that he has brought into American poetry something
altogether new - a voice that attempts to explore the
large questions about the human condition using the
ages old form of dramatic monologue in a completely
new way. To date, there are several such long "Bidart"
poems: "Herbert White", "Ellen West", "The War of
Vaslav Nijinsky", "The Second Hour of the Night" and
now, in this new collection, "The Third Hour of the
Night". The ambition of this life-long project is
enormous. The fact that his craft continues to live up
to this ambition is what makes Bidart a very special author at work today. In book after book after book he has
given us long, intense, self-contained poems that
explore essential components of human condition--from
our desire to our desire to make--with seriousness and
unmistakable genius. Genius is not a word I hesitate
to use when I write about Frank Bidart's life-long
work. This is the poet who has more in common with
Dostoevsky than with any of our contemporaries. Bidart
disdains the issues (such as critical theory or Irony,
with a capital "I", for instance) that obsess poets
today. Instead, he asks essential questions about what
it is to live in our time; he struggles with large,
unembarrassed emotions and original, serious ideas,
blending them together with force and spark.
This new collection, "Stardust," is particularly
interesting for its extended meditation on our wish to
be challenged by our actions, our need to produce
something meaningful from our time on this planet ("my
father's ring was B with a dart / through it, in
diamonds against polished black stone. // I have it.
What parents leave you / is their lives. Until my
mother died she struggled to make / a house that she
did not loathe; paintings; poems; me. / Many creatures
must / make, but only one must seek / within itself
what to make."). This exploration of creativity
culminates in "The Third Hour of the Night" where
Bidart spins the story of the Italian sculptor,
Benvenuto Cellini, asking moral questions in a
dramatic narrative rich with murder and desire to make
something beautiful, lasting enough to contain human
spirit. As unpredictable as the process of making
itself, the poem begins in Western notions of (and
struggle with) morality, and blends into an African
element of magic where violence and beauty are one
("In this universe anybody can kill anybody / with a
stick. What gods gave me / is their gift, the power to
bury within each / creature the hour it ceases. /
Everyone knows I have powers but not such power. / If
they knew I would be so famous / they would kill me. /
I tell you because your tongue is stone. / If the gods
ever give you words, one night in / sleep you will
wake to find me above you.) Here, Bidart does not just
expand on Stevens' dictum that "death is a mother of
beauty" - he makes of it a human necessity in a
beautifully written and highly vocal drama.
What is also striking for me about this new collection is how
many first rate short lyrics it contains. In Bidart's
earlier books he rarely included more than five or six
short poems along with his trademark long dramatic
monologue. This collection includes twenty two short
pieces, many of which (my own favorites-"Song",
"Romain Clerou", "The Soldier Who Guards the
Frontier", "Phenomenology of the Prick," "Curse,"
"Lament for the Makers," "Heart Beat," "Injunction",
"Hammer," "Luggage", "For Bill Nestrick")are destined to be
taught in schools and anthologized. His use of classical drama, most notably Shakespeare ("go make you ready") and the Jacobins is dazzling, and it further deepens the psychological
effect of his work. The fact that this Master poet, at
this stage of his career, is still changing his style,
unafraid to find and use new things is deeply
satisfying. There is more skill in Bidart's "Stardust"
than in all new-formalists and l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets
combined; the effects of his work are dizzying with
their musical unpredictability and narrative logic.
This is a book of beautiful, memorable poetry. I recommend it highly. --Ilya Kaminsky

These poems are yet another extension of Bidart's talent and extraordinary ability to paint a picture for us through words - his choice AND placement of them!

Frank Bidart, Star Dust (FSG, 2005)

I've just wandered through the already-posted Amazon reviews on this one, and it's pretty obvious that I'm in the minority. So I'll apologize beforehand, since it's obvious I'm wrong. After all, this collection was, in fact, a National Book Award finalist, though it lost to Merwin's Migration. Despite the overwhelming evidence that I am, in fact, wrong, I have to stick to my guns-- I just didn't like it anywhere near as much as everyone else seems to have.

First off, "The Third Hour of the Night" has to be addressed. The dramatic monologue, as a poetic device, has a long and revered history, as well it should. But the vast majority of dramatic monologues throughout the ages have been presented to us in formal verse, which allows for a freer language, because poetically it still has the form to fall back on; it's still unquestionably poetry. Doing dramatic monologues in free verse is exceptionally tricky; if you fall back into unpoetic language, you risk the entire house of cards toppling down around you, with your monologue looking like a speech that's been chopped up into little lines. It's worse when you're relating history. He central part of "The Third Hour of the Night," which takes up about a quarter of Star Dust's total length, tells us about Benvenuto Cellini. It's certainly not straight biographical information, but it still borders on the prosaic, and crosses over that line far too many times during its length. I know there's a lot of argument over this point, but to me, if it's too prosaic too many times, I simply can't look at it seriously as poetry.

Bookending the tome with "The Third Hour of the Night" is the chapbook Music Like Dirt, which focuses on the desire to create-- the primal, inborn desire. It would be easy to make cracks here about the primal urge needing some revision before it gets thrown to the wolves, but let's face it-- "The Third Hour of the Night" took up a whole issue of Poetry magazine in 2004. An entire issue. They've never done that before. Ever. And Poetry is the pinnacle. Whither goeth Poetry goeth a nation. Certainly whither goeth Poetry goeth the National Book Association.

But I still can't find a reason to consider it better than average. It's not worse than average, certainly, given how much less accomplished prosaic nonsense finds its way into magazines and webzines on a monthly basis, but it's not better, either. **

The poems in Frank Bidart's STAR DUST are a world unto themselves. They provide all the nourishment one needs from literature by exploring what is most deeply definitive about our humanity: our ability to love and to fail at love and our ability to create. The final poem of the book, the long "Third Hour of the Night" about the Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, reads like a nineteenth century European novel : its narrative fairly gallops. And like Dostoevsky, Bidart unflinchingly forces us to face the most difficult and urgent moral questions. Like his shaman in the final poem, Bidart dares to extract the heart of his subjects in order to examine it and then put it back. With Bidart as our guide we can travel through the underworld of his dark world vision and emerge edified and strengthened, if not entirely cleansed.

The best poems in this book launch themselves from Ezra Pound's experimentation with the use of letters, multiple voices, translation and other decidedly non-poetic materials, disjointedly culling these things together to create meaning in how they resonate off one another. Bidart similarly uses letters, grammatical errors, capitalized words, quotes from journals, etc, to infuse into his poems' forms meaning that is crucial to the emotional and narrative understanding coming from the meaning and music of the words themselves. An important achievement.

Bidart's success at this is in part what makes readers blow off Pound's Cantos. Bidart's interest is in human relations, and illustrated these through small interactions. While Pound had similar goals in mind, he never stayed long in the personal interaction, jumping so quickly to usury, metamorphosis, and other topics and grand modernist allusiveness. The reader feels to put-out. Bidart stayed with the people, with their hurt. Lowell taught this. Readers can argue the effectiveness, can worry about whether it is wrong for a writer to take interest in his/her own life, but Bidart has in his poems fused two hugely important poetic movements, and has enlarged the understanding of what poetry can be.

I was confused at Ms. Greens online review of Bidart's collected poems 'In the Western Night'. I would almost hazard a guess that Ms. green had read a different book altogether. Mr. Bidart is one of the few poets of his generation who is both emotionally articulate and uncompromisingly intelligent. He is able, as few are, to look at the darkness or often horror of this world and not patronize it by inventing hope where there isn't any, or relying on empty though pretty lyric gestures to make things 'all right'. His radical, and neccesary, punctuation was come too over the course of his first two books.The punctuation, as Jonathan Galassi and Donald Hall have pointed out, informs the poem as deeply as line breaks do. It seems to me that Mr. Bidart's poems are some of the few that can hold an honest dialogue with the violence that we are a part of today.He is, in the end, a surprising and wonderful poet.

I recall an old Alan Alda movie, "The Mephisto Waltz," in which a famous pianist, about to die, conducts an occult ritual in order to transfer his soul, personality, and musical talent into the body of another man. Similarly, Frank Bidart appropriates and inserts himself into the biographies of other people without seeming to derive any insight into their personalities, their self-understanding. For Bidart -- or, at least, for Bidart's poetry -- the only self that seems really to exist is Bidart's own.

The problem is not only that Bidart, as one reviewer has noted, lacks the style or imagination to differentiate between the various characters populating his poems. It's that none of Bidart's characters ARE characters. The client on the psychotherapist's couch in "Confessional," the mad dancer Nijinsky of "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky," the anorectic title character of "Ellen West," even the necrophilic child-murderer of Bidart's early poem "Herbert White" are, in some sense, nobody but Bidart: each character explains his or her own dilemmas in the same way that Bidart explains his own. In "Confessional," Bidart conflates his own story of a mother whom he perceived as a "smotherer" with an anecdote about a strangled cat borrowed from the memoirs of the late 19th-century British travel writer Augustus Hare because, as Bidart reveals to Mark Halliday in a 1983 interview, "I needed it. Everything else in the poem had to be 'true.'" (The interview, originally published in Ploughshares, is included in this volume). Similarly, in his so-called "persona" poems, Bidart invests the lives of his characters with his own self-understanding. There is no attempt to apprehend THEIR self-understandings.

However solipsistic his means, Bidart appears in his poems to be making a sincere effort to understand his own suffering. But self-understanding -- or, as it appears several times in his poems, "insight" -- is in the end no match for his apparent need to maintain an aesthetic which turns suffering into an objet d'art, a decoration, while ignoring the more fundamental truths of suffering in a century that has been rife with it.

Bidart's prosody is also unconvincing. It is nonmetrical, depending -- as all verse depends -- on line breaks, stanza breaks, and white space to get how to read it across to the reader; and also on idiosyncratic use of punctuation, italics, and capitalization. None of this is objectionable in itself. But unfortunately the language Bidart uses is unmusical, unremarkable, even dull, and dressing it up in capital letters and italics doesn't change it. The principal effect of the all-caps is to make readers feel as though they should shout as they read.

May we be reminded this was a great choice in 1997 for the National Book Critics Circle Award. I point this out because most of the books that have received the award are great reads. His book "Golden State" probably was the best before this, while remembering "The Sacrifice" as well. I want to find a copy of "Golden State". Anyway, when thinking about this book, one should remember the notoriety that it and its author have received. It was a finalist for the National Book Award as well. I have found that both awards can sometimes mean that the book is actually worth more of a read than some pulitzer prize winning books, especially more recently.

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This is a very short book. I enjoyed some of its first half when I read it. Then, but for two poems, I didn't even care to read the rest more than once. I tried, but it had little to no emotional impact. I love, love, love his interpretation of Catullus's Odi Et Amo -- love it. I'd say it's worth the price of admission, but... there it is right in the book description above, to be easily printed out and saved (and only one version is in this book). I couldn't get into the second half at all, the long (half-book length) poem based on Ovid's work. I liked the idea more than its execution; I was bored.

The book is good; his style is good, but somehow only two poems stuck with me; "Odi Et Amo" (called Catullus: Excrucior here) and the one the other reviewer mentioned, with the line, "I wake and sleep and wake and sleep...." I think reading the same number of poems of his, on the internet, would suffice. If you love the Catulus poem like I do -- in its original, there are other English-speaking poets who've also written interesting interpretations -- I particularly like Ezra Pound's.

This book is self-indulgent tripe ... there's a fine line between the wonderful tradition of rewriting and reinterpreting previously-told stories (see Ann Carson's Autobiography of Red for an absolutely glittering example) and just retelling. In this case, the story of Cineras and Myrra is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses and spun out in excruciating detail. The difference between Ovid (and for that matter Carson) and Bidart is that the former poets use interesting language, whereas Bidart's is boring and self-aggrandizing.

"The Second Hour of the Night" is probably the best long poem written in English in the past few decades. This book was robbed of the Pulitzer, and is worth buying (or just reading) for it alone. The first half of the book is, honestly, just filler. But the second, final poem makes up for it!

Frank Bidart's the best American Poetry's got