Review by New York Times Review
FRANK BIDART got noticed during the 1970s and '80s for poems that did not sound like poems at all: a disjointed monologue by a serial killer, another by Ludwig Binswanger's anorexic and ultimately suicidal patient Ellen West and, later, disquisitions on the history of philosophy, in spiky free verse full of capital letters, italics, white space and unconventional punctuation. Bidart's extreme typography helped him convey extreme states of mind; it also helped show how his lines ought to sound, read aloud. More recent and more traditionally lyrical books have taken on well-defined topics: "Desire" (1997) was largely about sex, "Watching the Spring Festival" (2008) about beauty. Bidart's new book returns to the rough, terse and sometimes shocking phrasings that won him attention decades ago. He uses them, now, to look back, to ask how memory works, what poetry does, and what either of them can do for souls, and bodies, past the midpoint of a life. If the new book has one topic, it is retrospect: the poet "at seventy-two" remembers his frustrated mother and father, his proudly racist Spanish grandmother, the Catholic faith they once shared and the precedents - literary, cinematic and sexual - that have shaped him as an adult. He also looks back at earlier poets and poems, including his own. There's even a seven-page prose poem called "Writing 'Ellen West,'" made out of scraped-down, wiry single sentences separated by bullet points. "'Ellen West' was written in the year after his mother's death," Bidart recalls, using third person for his prior self. "By the time she died he had so thoroughly betrayed the ground of intimacy on which his life was founded he had no right to live." In his poetry, Bidart has been open about being gay at least since "Desire"; now he remembers how the meaning of homosexuality has changed. "For each gay kid whose adolescence / was America in the forties or fifties," he writes in a poem called "Queer," "the primary, the crucial / scenario / forever is coming out - / or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not." The process of coming out - of declaring and claiming one's own desires, so that one might not be ashamed to fulfill them - is for Bidart never over: sometimes he writes with such anger that it sounds like something just begun. Another poem reverses the optimism in most coming-out stories: "When what we understand about / what we are / changes, whole / parts of us fall mute." (Those last two words would be something like "open up" in a more conventional poem.) The forceful starkness in Bidart's usual style - almost no description, few overt euphonies, plenty of repetition - fits characters who try to test, or reject, or escape, the limits of the merely physical, describable world. Most of all they are trying to get out of their bodies. Though Bidart spends so much energy on that characteristically human undertaking, memory, he also compares himself to a begging dog, "butt on couch and front legs straddling / space": "How dare being / give him this body. / Held up to a mirror, he writhed." In art, as in sex, Bidart says, we seek what we know we will never be able to find - certainty, security, repose, an escape from the limits of being only ourselves: "Someone wanted more from that bed/ than was found there. / Name the bed that's not true of." This book of terse recollections is also a book of elegies, considering the deaths of Bidart's parents, "earth's inmates," and anticipating his own death: They drop into holes in the earth, everything you loved, loved and hated, as you will drop - and the moment when all was possible gone. The words themselves drop, like stones, into the void where nothing can be heard or seen. To immerse oneself in Bidart's work is to enter a crowd of scary, unusual characters: artistic geniuses, violent misfits, stunted failures and dramatic self-accusers (including, in some of his guises, the poet himself). Yet it is also to discover credible claims about the lives that many of us choose: "Each kid is at the edge of a sea. / At each kid's feet multitudinous voices say I will buy you if you buy me." Bidart in his teens considered becoming a priest; now he believes that "priests, addicted to / unanswerable but necessary questions, / also everywhere are addicted to cruel answers." His poems say instead that no answers satisfy him - none from religion, certainly, and perhaps none from the writers, composers, filmmakers and actors to whom he nonetheless pays homage: "Victor Hugo / and Berlioz," Michelangelo Antonioni, Leos Janacek, Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain," Ava Gardner in "Pandora and the Flying Dutchman": "She wants, of course, to throw her life away." These poems do not lay out a path to happiness, but they do provide a theory of art: "Each creature must / himself, you were sure, grind the lens / through which he perceives the world," Bidart says (he is addressing, but not quoting, Walt Whitman). Sometimes Bidart's lens can seem out of focus, merely personal: "I won the Oedipal struggle /first against my father then stepfather ... Adolescence and the world / showed me this was prison." His best lines are far more mysterious, tied to a life story that may or may not be his own, as in the barely glimpsed, yet gripping, drama of "Rio": I am here to fix the door. Use has almost destroyed it. Disuse would have had the same effect. No, you're not confused, you didn't call If you call you still have hope. Now you think you have lived past the necessity for doors. Carmen Miranda is on the TV, inviting you to Rio. Go to sleep while I fix the door. Bidart writes through passion, but also through subtraction, leaving out all but the statements that seem essential to the soul, the desire, the wisdom or the memory at hand. The results, however austere, can be revelations: his poems are doors best opened with cautious attention - behind them you might even see yourself. Stephen Burt's new collection of poems, "Belmont," has just been published.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Bidart (Watching the Spring Festival, 2008), winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, among many other awards, takes what is for him a radically personal approach in this candid and inquiring collection. A poet of refined distillation, Bidart writes with rare cogency and poignancy of the war between the mind and the body, ecstasy and obliteration, his mother's death, and his coming out. In reflections on the mysteries of being, Bidart uses the words crave, flesh, stone, soul, idea, and dream in a beautifully plangent philosophical calculus of longing. A master of the ready counterpoint of the couplet, Bidart can be tart and bemusing, as in the title poem with its dark twist, as well as richly emotive in his yearning for metaphysical clarity. As he explains in his notes, poems are curses, exorcism, prayer . . . the attempt to make someone or something live again. His, he declares, is an aesthetics of embodiment. There is a quiet, stirring grandeur here as Bidart contemplates the spectrum of existence, life's endless transformations, and our hunger for the absolute. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"At seventy-two, the future is what I mourn," Bidart announces in this starkly inspiring eighth collection. The poet's spiky free reverse remains direct, sometimes even frightening, and clearer than ever before about mortality-his own death, and the deaths of his friends and his parents; and yet, perhaps in the spirit of anticipatory mourning, familiar interests-in old and new movies, terse metaphysical argument, and sex, especially sex between men- are all present. "The true language of ecstasy/ is the forbidden// language of the mystics," he says in "Defrocked," exploring the language of piety as well as of blasphemy as he returns to his Bakersfield, Calif., childhood and his family's Catholic belief. Bidart's taut lines investigate faith and doubt, art and yearning, erotic fulfillment and literary heritage, "fueled by the ruthless gaze that/ unshackled the chains shackling/ queer me in adolescence," even as they investigate their own premises; in "Writing 'Ellen West,' " they also ask how Bidart composed one of his own most famous poems. The new volume veers away from the interest in overt beauty, rendered in musical lines, that was evinced in Watching the Spring Festival (2009), leaning more in this volume on the wiry abstractions of Bidart's earlier work. At the same time, the poems of Metaphysical Dog are at once emotionally bracing and full of intellectual reward. Bidart is widely admired by other influential poets; he seems in line for even more attention than he has received. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"Writing 'Ellen West'/ was exorcism," says Bollingen Prize winner Bidart in a gloss on his famous earlier poem about an anorexic from The Book of the Body (1977). Beneath that older poem, he uncovers a guilt-laden struggle for independence from his mother and the devastation he felt at her death: "This is the body that you can draw out of you to expel from you the desire to die." In fact, Bidart's theme from the beginning has been the burden of the body-how the soul's presence and absence are rooted in the physical: "Words/ are flesh." In this new book, terror and shame connected with the young body's flaws and differences-sexual and otherwise-ebb in the face of old age, a muted phase in which the body one loves best inhabits memory. The final poem, "For an Unwritten Opera," strikes a lyric, almost formal pose, invoking "magpie beauty"-a kind of separateness within unity that can shape itself into love. VERDICT Another restless exploration from a writer whose work defies conventionality and refuses to stop asking questions; for all poetry collections.-Ellen Kaufman, New York (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
