Review by New York Times Review
JERUSALEM, by Alan Moore. (Liveright, $24.95.) In a sprawling tribute to his hometown, Moore, the author of "Watchmen" and other graphic novels, traces a single day in Northampton, England, in 2006. The book fuses fantasy and even Joycean tropes to create an entertaining, passionate story. As our reviewer, Douglas Wolk, put it, "It's a vehicle for nothing less than Moore's personal cosmology of space, time and life after death." LEONARDO DA VINCI, by Walter Isaacson. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) Isaacson, an acclaimed biographer of the futurists Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, turns his focus to the far-ranging talents of the Renaissance genius. The book deals plainly with Leonardo's contradictions, giving the story complexity and depth, and Isaacson interweaves his subject's contemplations of nature with his art. THE CHILD FINDER, by Rene Denfeld. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) Naomi, a private investigator in Oregon and the novel's title character, is known for her particular aptitude in tracking down lost children. On the hunt for Madison, who's been lost for three years, Naomi confronts memories of her own past as a missing child. The story shifts between her perspective and Madison's, revealing the child's tactics to survive captivity. HOW TO TAME A FOX (AND BUILD A DOG): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution, by Lee Alan Dugatkln and Lyudmila Trut. (University of Chicago, $18.) How did dogs become dogs? This book considers a pioneering Soviet study begun the late 1950s that replicated the domestication process with silver foxes; Trut is the current lead researcher on the project. Our reviewer, Marlene Zuk, praised the book, writing, "It is the backdrop to a story that is part science, part Russian fairy tale and part spy thriller." HALF-LIGHT: Collected Poems, 1965-2016, by Frank Bidart. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.) The poems across this collection, winner of the 2017 National Book Award, trace Bidart's evolution over his decades-long career. On display is his approach to autobiographical poetry, interweaving the inner lives of other people (both real and fictional); the method and the resulting poems rank among his most significant contributions to the genre. THE VANITY FAIR DIARIES: Power, Wealth, Celebrity, and Dreams: My Years at the Magazine That Defined a Decade, by Tina Brown. (Picador, $20.) Brown's account of Vanity Fair in the 1980s and early 1990s - by all measures a period of splashy excess - will thrill media junkies. It also offers a look at Brown's own insecurities, particularly the strains of being a career-driven mother.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Given his acknowledgement of Robert Lowell as a major influence, much of Bidart's work is, as Lowell's was characterized, confessional. He reports what was wrong with his parents, who weren't up for family life because of his mother's shaky mental health and his father's womanizing, neither of which Bidart could forgive. This lack of forgiveness seems to be what merits confessing, not his scholarly bent, homosexuality, or flight from his native California to New England. In the non-confessional remainder poems, he is even more a teller of tales, all from Roman, Renaissance, Mongol, and modernist-art history and lore. Four of these long poems are called hours of the night, referring to the ancient Egyptian myth holding that, while it is dark, the sun god must / journey through / THE WORLD THAT IS BENEATH THE WORLD, / . . . must / meet, once again, the dead. Bidart's poems strive, more than anything else, to present particular voices speaking, which accounts for their distinctive punctuation (e.g., ,) and idiosyncratic interior capitalization, more than to express meaning. But meaning there is, of course, concerning love, death, conflict, ambition, and disappointment, found between lacunae and jump cuts like in a Godard movie or an Eliot poem.--Olson, Ray Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Throughout his long and celebrated career, Bidart has conducted a single-minded exploration of the sources and meanings of emotional intensity, the passions, fears, and cravings that drive people to do what we do, often against our own interests. We reach for what cuts us, spend our desire on what we can never have, destroy what we desperately need. Meanwhile, some of us-Bidart's favorite heroic and tragic figures, such as Mozart, Maria Callas, Édith Piaf, and Marilyn Monroe-create art, because, as Bidart says in his Pulitzer-nominated chapbook Music Like Dirt, "we are creatures who need to make." The creation of art, in Bidart's view, is the only means we have of transcending our circumstances, even temporarily. Bidart-a friend and disciple in the 1970s of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and then lifelong torch-carrier for their legacies, began with extended dramatic monologues, including his two most famous poems, "Herbert White" and "Ellen West," unprecedentedly sympathetic studies from the inside of deranged consciousnesses ("'When I hit her on the head, it was good,// and then I did it to her a couple of times,-/ but it was funny,-afterwards,/ it was as if somebody else did it'"). Alongside these, he wrote subtle confessional poems examining his own identity as a small-town California native transplanted to the high-culture world of the East Coast. In the 1980s and '90s, his poems-from the The Sacrifice, The Book of the Body, and Desire-were about with human physicality and frailty, sex, sexuality, and its disappointments and dangers, as well as mortality: "Whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within/ me as I die dies with me," writes Bidart in "Home Faber," a two-line poem. Desire also continues Bidart's ongoing series of Hours of the Night poems, miasmic long narrative pieces, like the insomniac stirrings of an endlessly restless, culture-obsessed mind bent toward the past and "Grief for the unloved life, grief/ which, in middle age or old age, as goad// or shroud, comes to all." Then come the short lyrics of recent books, which attempt to reckon with, among other things, a queer identity repressed and sublimated throughout an entire life: "Lie to yourself about this and you will/ forever lie about everything." Closing the book is a new collection of poems obsessed with elegy, memory, and still-persistent desire in old age; Bidart remains as good as ever. He concludes with the fourth (of a proposed 12) Hour of the Night, which he calls the "hour from which I cannot wake." As a poet, Bidart is one of my central models. Relentless and ever willing to face his demons, no matter how terrifying, in the interest of making great art, Bidart is, to my ear, one of the very few major living poets who never wavers, never repeats himself (though he has always orbited the same concerns), and extends his questing and questioning through each new work. This collected poems is an almost overwhelming bounty, a permanent book. (Aug.) Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet and critic; the editor of Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz; and PW's director of digital operations. © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
