Star Dust

by Frank Bidart

In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger structure--now, with Star Dust, finally complete.

Throughout his work, Bidart has been uniquely alert to the dramatic possibilities of violence; in this, and in his sense of theater, he resembles the great Jacobean dramatists. It is no accident that Webster's plays echo in "The Third Hour of the Night," the brilliant long poem that dominates the second half of Star Dust. Bidart locates in Benvenuto Cellini the speaker truest to his own vision. Who better to speak of the drive to create, not as reverie or pleasure or afterthought, but as task and burden, thwarted by the world? In its scale, sonorities, extraordinary leaps, and juxtapositions, "The Third Hour of the Night" makes an astonishing counterbalance to the intense, spare lyrics that precede it.

In this profound and unforgettable new book, the dream beyond desire (which now seems to represent human destiny) is rooted in the drive to create, a drive tormented at every stage by failure, as the temporal being fights for its survival by making an eternal life. Bidart is a poet of passionate originality, and Star Dust shows that the forms of this originality continue to deepen and change as he constantly renews his contract with the idea of truth. 
Star Dust is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Gay, Adult, Queer Studies, LGBT

84 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2005

About the author

Frank Bidart is the author of Metaphysical Dog (FSG, 2013), Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2008), Star Dust (FSG, 2005), Desire (FSG, 1997), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990). He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the 2007 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful poems in which the power to make is perhaps the strongest human desire: except perhaps the desire to destroy, to commit violence. The violence here is graphic and repulsive yet contained within the vessels of poetry. Interesting use of the artist Cellini in Bidart's The Third Hour, part of an ongoing work.

[Nicole Gervasio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remember buying this volume in Harvard's bookstore as a naive and doe-eyed undergraduate senior, marveling in the magic of the Cambridge campus. It was the first time I'd ever seen the infamous old Ivy Leaguer, and I was there for my first academic conference at the English Institute.

I bought Bidart's (new, at the time) volume to commemorate the experience and read the whole thing by myself in a cafe, with a Starbucks latte and time on my hands. I love his sensitive, sensual verse, particularly his meditations on loss and sex, like "Luggage." It's also one of those collections where the titular poem really is one of the best and most representative: "Star Dust," sibilant as ever, all of it a pleasure to read aloud.

[Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps I need more experience in poetry reading. I did read this, but I have very little understanding. Some of the poems sounded and looked beautiful, but their meaning and purpose were lost to me. I did pick up two themes: violence and the struggle of creativity.

Here's one of the shorter ones:

Hadrian's Deathbed

Flutter-animal
talkative
unthing

soon from all tongue unhoused

where
next

forgotten
voiceless
scared?

If the purpose of these was to evoke a blunted affect, it succeeds. The language is often wondrous, the scope is large, but I felt nothing for these poems.

Again, I'm sure to blame. I'll pick this up later when I'm older or after I'm bored with Billy Collins or something.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Until now, I've never admired a work that kept me firmly at arms length. I'm just going to say it, genius can be distancing.

Despite the chasm I felt subtly reassembled, looped into the mad rhythm and imagery.

This is very good, beyond me in a challenging way but what I expected from the creator of Herbert White.




I read this for you Hank.

[Joanne van der Vlies · Rating 5 out of 5]

 • "Understand that there is a beast within you that can drink till it is sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. Understand that it will use the conventions of the visible world to turn your tongue to stone. It alone knows you. It does not wish you well."
 • "In this light is our grave. Obdurate, you say: We are darkness. We are the city whose brightness blots the stars from night."
 • "I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary bed it said But he loves me which broke my will."

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

All poetry is worthwhile, each poet and volume giving a fresh window onto the world and word. Bidart's work does not speak as strongly to me as others. In particular, the entire final poem ("Third Hour of the Night") was, for me, something that would have been better written as a brief prose history (of Benvenuto Cellini) than as the poem he attempted. I don't find the "fusion of emotional ferocity and formal exactitude" (from the cover blurb) at all ferocious or exact or convincing. On the other hand, one of the shorter poems, "Song", had wonderful moments and coherence (again, for me): "It is not raining inside/ tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in." (the repetition of the phrase "cease to exist" previous to these last two lines shows some of what I take the reviewer to have meant--there's an emotional poignancy, if not ferocity, and an interesting formalism there).

[Angelina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not really my kind of poetry.

[Joyce Zhu · Rating 4 out of 5]

"the third hour of the night" published alone would have been a solid 6/5, but the rest of his mediocre poems had to intervene

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst books of poetry I've ever read. It's pretentious and lacking in technique. The poet alludes to people like Marx and Mozart to make himself seem sophisticated, although his boring and repetitive style proves otherwise. There are undertones of non-traditional viewpoints (antinatalist; homosexual), but basically the entire book is about man's need to create. This idea falls pretty flat and is amateur in its execution, with lines like "Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves/Without clarity, a curse, a misfortune" (p. 12, "Advice to the Players") and "Many creatures must/make, but only one must seek/within itself what to make" (p. 22 "Lament for the Makers").

At forty-three pages, a single poem called "The Third Hour of the Night" comprises over half of Star Dust. This is a narrative poem about Benvenuto Cellini. I don't know enough about Cellini's life to tell how accurate the poem is, but it's a bunch of boring stuff about Renaissance Florence, Duke Cosimo de Medici, and some Pope. I struggled to get through it because a) I didn't expect a forty-page biography in a book of poems, b) I generally dislike lengthy poems, and c) FRANK BIDART HAS NO BUSINESS CALLING THIS THING A POEM. There is nothing poetic about it. You can't just throw in a bunch of line breaks and call it poetry. There's no rhyme, no meter, no interesting diction, no euphony, NOTHING. If I wanted to read a boring wall of text about Cellini I would go to Wikipedia.

Poems that I liked:
"Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words"

=1/23 (4.3%) poems that I liked.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

That the book first half of the book, Music Like Dirt, is heralded as the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize is bound to irritate some folks. Chapbooks have been around for a long time and Music Like Dirt does not stand out as a remarkable in terms of what the genre can do. "For Bill Nestrick" & "Advice to the Players" are not good enough.

"The Third Hour of the Night" makes up for this. Bidart is only beautiful when there's an element of confrontation to it. & though this poem is gilded with the sort of Italian renaissance reference coordinates that give old-heads boners, it also punctures romantic conceptions of this period. His artists are always married to politics. Instead of using blogs and lectures to lob critiques over aesthetic divides, they cut each others throats. Whether this is a good or bad thing seems beside the point--its more of a reminder to make, furiously, before the hammer falls.

Also a good study in terms of integrating narrative elements into a lyric structure. Seems clumsy sometimes--others, really smart.

[M. D. Hudson · Rating 1 out of 5]

The entire “verse section” of the October 2004 issue of Poetry magazine, nearly 40 pages, was devoted to a single poem, Frank Bidart’s "The Third Hour of the Night." From a literary standpoint, this is a significant event: America’s most preeminent poetry magazine clearing the decks for one of America’s most esteemed poets. Soon after, the whole shebang was reissued in a book called "Stardust." The existence of this poem, and the way Poetry magazine cleared the decks of everything else to publish it provoked in me a bout of uncharacteristic energy that now, some ten years later, amounts to 32 unfinished pages of unpublishable critical essay. I doubt I'll muster the energy, or the ten-years-ago dismay, to finish the thing, so I am going to throw out what Goodreads word-count will allow me. I do own a copy of "Stardust" - it showed up, as many books of verse do, as a remainder on Daedalus Books - but except for "The Third Hour of the Night" I haven't read it.

***

So who is Frank Bidart? Paul Zimmer described Bidart’s place in American letters thusly:

“Frank Bidart is almost a legendary figure. He is a winner of prestigious awards, including the Shelley Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Prize; he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell and a pallbearer at his funeral. A kindly, deeply intelligent, humane man, he has been a part of the main literary scene for thirty years. In 2001 he received the Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets and, in their citation, the jury, chaired by Louise Glück, stated: “He is, in the feeling of the jury, one of the great poets of our time.” (Zimmer, Paul, “From the Mummy’s Breast” (an essay review of six poetry collections), The Georgia Review, Fall 2003 (pp. 627-629)

Zimmer nicely encapsulates Bidart’s lofty stature in contemporary American poetry. And if Louise Glück says he's great, well, you know it's got to be true. Given such credentials, Poetry’s decision to grant Bidart an entire issue makes perfect editorial sense, for here is “one of the great poets of our time” with a long, ambitious poem, the fruition of over thirty years of intelligent, dedicated, labor to the Art of Poetry. However, as much editorial sense as Bidart’s high-profile appearance might have made, what does not make sense is the fact that “The Third Hour of the Night” is such a very bad poem.

As far as I can tell, “The Third Hour of the Night” is a very serious, very ambitious poem that attempts to apprehend some of the most fundamental problems of human existence, and for this its creator has my respect. Also, I want to make clear that I have no problem with the fact that Bidart occasionally employs multiple voices or non-standard syntax; John Berryman uses such techniques in his “Dream Songs” with considerable success, and I am a Berryman admirer. I also want to note that I have no prejudices one way or another about poems that are either formal or in free verse, which is to say I have no problems with Bidart’s technical approach to the poem. To be sure, all of these factors are important to the creation of poetry. But no matter the structure, the brilliance of its ideas, or the good intentions of its creator, a poem that consists of one wrong word after another is going to be a bad poem. And Bidart’s diction is a disaster: slovenly, cliché-ridden, pompous, and often incoherent.

The general definition of diction that I will be using is a simple, straightforward one, based on the definition from my 1947 Webster’s: "Choice of words to express ideas; mode of expression in language."

***

Because of its great length, my evaluation of "The Third Hour of the Night" will cover of the single page that was posted on Poetry’s web site when Bidart was that particular week’s "Featured Poet of the Week" (October 2004). I will admit that it is manifestly unfair of me to only take one section of such a long poem to evaluate the whole. No doubt there are some pretty poor sections to be found in the Aenid or Paradise Lost or any other worthy long poem. However, in my defense, given that this was the section selected to represent the Bidart as the "Poet of the Week," I think it fair to assume that Poetry’s editors considered this to be one of the most worthy and representative selection from the whole poem.

This part of the poem under discussion is divided into four sections; each section shall be addressed separately and, during the course of my commentary, quoted in their entirety. Italics and punctuation are Bidart’s, except where I use ellipses to indicate a line or stanza break made by me for purposes of discussion.

Section 1: The edgeless screen receiving light…

When the eye

When the edgeless screen receiving
light from the edgeless universe

When the eye first

When the edgeless screen facing
outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe

When the eye first saw that it

Hungry for more light
resistlessly began to fold back upon itself TWIST


The poem, like the universe it purports to address, starts off with a big bang. Here’s the universe, your eye, some light, and your hunger (for more light, I think). Again, a lack of ambition or nerve will not be one of my criticisms leveled at Bidart. But this fearless grapple with the very pith of existence fails immediately and the failure is directly attributable to the fact that in six stanzas consisting of fewer than forty words, Bidart heedlessly trots out the following hackneyed poeticisms, clichés or near- clichés and awkward constructions:

• Eye The “eye” is often used in contemporary poetry as a stand-in for the word “soul.” Soul, of course, is a word not usable for serious poetic purposes any more, having been long ago ruined by the Victorians. Nevertheless, “eye” has become as nearly bankrupt as “soul” these days; and as we shall see, nothing is really done with the eye except here at the beginning to give the whole thing an initial jolt. This eye is just a place-keeper, a little dab of the transcendental. It makes me think of the famous green eye irradiating from atop the Great Seal’s pyramid on the back of a one dollar bill.

• universe The word “universe” is, of course, another big, windy word, in fact it is the biggest word in the…universe. It is so big that it becomes a very difficult word to successfully wield, and I’m not really sure why it is even here. As far as I can tell, the poem as a whole is a sort of riff on very human problems of the mind/body split, mortality, etc. The universe really has nothing to do with any of this except to add a basso profundo throb to the production right from the get-go.

• edgeless Of course no professional American poet would never make the mistake of using the term “endless universe” in a poem, and so Bidart substituted the word “edgeless” instead. But this fools nobody. To state that the universe is either edgeless or endless are literary conventions used to pump up the volume or fill out a line. As far as I can tell, the fact that both the “screen” and the “universe” are “edgeless” provide some sort of terrible symmetry adding to the overall vast terribleness of it all.

• as if hypnotized: Since serious poets can no longer write “mesmerized” or “o’er awed,” Bidart had to resort to hypnosis which is sort of scientific and therefore considered more legit by some poets. But what is going on here? Is the “edgeless screen” behaving “as if hypnotized” because of the phenomenon of an “edgeless universe?” Or is it your eye that acts as if hypnotized? It is very difficult to puzzle this out, not because something interesting and subtle is going on, but because nothing really fits together.

• resistlessly Well, “resistlessly” is a word, according to the dictionary. Nobody can accuse Bidart of striving for the mellifluous. Beyond the look and sound of the word, I had trouble getting my mind around what Bidart was actually saying with this word. Does it mean the screen’s act of folding was characterized by not offering resistance? Does it mean “helplessly”? I am not trying to be obtuse about this, for I understand in general what he is trying to say here, but when examined, this word, like so many others in the poem, does not really fire on all cylinders.

• hungry To hunger for something (other than food) is almost beyond cliché in the English language. It has as much concrete specific meaning emotionally as it does physically. Which is to say that I do not automatically object to Bidart’s use of the word in this poem. However, the problem here is that surrounded as it is by verbal afflatus, the word’s inherent weakness as a near-cliché is not buttressed by anything around it.

• light If “eye” is the modern stand-in for soul, “light” is often the modern stand-in for everything else that is insubstantial yet significant outside the soul. Having light do unusual, kooky things, is usually a sign of poetic desperation, and here Bidart has the light “fold back upon itself.” He also has the “edgeless screen” be “hungry for more light.” But no matter how strangely it behaves, so much metaphorical meaning has been leached from the word “light” through over-use that it is virtually worthless now for poetry unless employed very, very carefully. Robert Pinsky once complained about light “doing the wildly unexpected” thirty years ago. Now as then, light is not a viable shortcut to poetic profundity; rather it is a short circuit, a damaged wire no longer capable of carrying a current. Nevertheless, here as in so many other contemporary American poems, “light” is plugged in to raise the voltage.

It is not that I expect a poem of such large ambitions to have everything nailed down in the first few stanzas. And it is not that I am completely baffled by what is going on at this point. But what is it here that is working? The way Bidart is putting the words together here adds up to only a vaporous, yet conventional, description of some sort of existential problem, a variation of the old “man vs. nature” couched in slackly abstract terms. The poem’s diction, poor stuff that it is, can only produce imagery that is ready-made off-the-rack stuff. Thanks to this lack of substance, the poem fails to engage on an emotional level, even as it eludes meaning on an intellectual level. So far, Bidart has not gotten anything right.

This being said, however, the poem does improve somewhat after these first six stanzas. For the first time something tangible appears, a dog, even a dead dog, being so much more apprehensible than an edgeless screen or an edgeless universe or light folding back on itself. Even the first italicized section between the dogs (“Ignorant of origins…”) works better now, since this second voice now has something to work against. Here is the end of the first section of the poem:

As if a dog sniffing

Ignorant of origins
familiar with hunger

As if a dog sniffing a dead dog

Before nervous like itself but now
weird inert cold nerveless

Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself

When the eye
first saw that it must die When the eye first

Brooding on our origins you
ask When and I say

Then

Not to “workshop” this poem, but note what a better poem it would be if the first six stanzas were dropped and it started here with the sniffing dog. But again, the diction is often weak throughout these stanzas. For example, the juxtaposition of “nervous” and “nerveless” and the use of both “weird” and “inert” strike me as desperate attempts to get a pulse. The adverb “abruptly “ does not seem quite right; it would serve better modifying “twisting” in that line, or could be left off altogether, since “twisting in panic” would already lead a reader to believe the sniffing was bound to be “abruptly” done. The pompous line “Brooding on our origins you” appears to be trying to drive home again the point that some really important, profound stuff is getting worked over here. However, “brooding” is another hard-to-handle word that Bidart heedlessly plugs into this poem. Used carelessly, as it is here, it comes across sounding too much the way Edgar Allen Poe used brooding when versifying about one of his dead lady friends; in Bidart’s poem, it functions similarly as just another spooky-poem word. Finally, although outside my critical aim here, I feel compelled to note that the rhyme “When the eye / first saw that it must die…” is simply awful.

Section 2: Fresh bandages and a pail of disinfectant…

The second section is very short, only seven lines, but despite its brevity, Bidart manages a stunning display of slovenly language:

wound-dresser let us call the creature

driven again and again to dress with fresh
bandages and a pail of disinfectant
suppurations that cannot
heal for the wound that confers existence is mortal

wound-dresser

what wound is dressed the wound of being

At this point I began to suspect it possible that Bidart is kidding us; for surely he cannot write this badly without intending a joke. How else can you explain “a pail of disinfectant”? A pail? A New Yorker cartoon comes to mind, one showing a zoo keeper with this pail and a mop, swabbing down the rear end of a rhinoceros. To be sure, if you need a pail of disinfectant, you must have a lot of hurt, buddy!

Even more ludicrous in its own way is the closing prepositional phrase in the second stanza: “…for the wound that confers existence is mortal.” Recited aloud, this line might possess a high-toned sonorousness. If reciting “e pluribus unum” into an empty stairwell with a good echo, you might be able to raise a cheap rhetorical thrill with the sound of it. But make no mistake, there is nothing here but a bombastic semi-cliché addressing the fact that human beings die.

And yet the wound continues to suppurate in this brief section of the poem, for the section circles back on itself to trot out another version of the “wound that confers existence” in the form of a third-rate existential one-liner: “the wound of being.” Let me make clear here that I am not objecting to this because the wound-that-never-heals is a literary trope of great antiquity (for example, see Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow, which is Wilson’s critical appropriation of Sophocles’ Philocetes). To be sure, the “problem” or “wound” of existence is one of mankind’s great, unanswered problems and certainly a fit topic for poetry. But thanks to Bidart’s slapdash approach to this problem, he accomplishes nothing here, even though (or perhaps because he does so) all these big words are trotted out (“existence,” “mortal,” “being”). Furthermore, these words, as unpromising as they are to start with, are handled with all the imagination, wit and sensitivity found in a typical heavy-metal rock lyric, which often employ the same apocalyptic, yet bankrupt language. At the very least, poetry should be at least as well written as the lyrics of a Led Zeppelin song!

Again, it really could be that Bidart is pulling our leg, that this poem is supposed to be funny, a joke. If this is the case, then my close reading of the poem is missing Bidart’s point. Even if this is true, I can offer only this, a stick-in-the-mud’s only defense: if this poem is a joke, it isn’t nearly funny enough.

Section 3: Paralyzing into unending incompletion…

Section Three looks considerably different than the sections before it, even if the diction does not get any better. The twisting and suffering and suppurating have been replaced by a hectoring, master-to-pupil voice, rendered in longer lines and more convoluted diction. Which is to say, the poem actually gets worse:

Understand that it can drink till it is
sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.

It alone knows you. It does not wish you well.

Understand that when your mother, in her only
pregnancy, gave birth to twins

painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of one child

was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers
invisibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power.

Painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of the other child

was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers
visibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power.

Envying the other, of course each twin

tried to punish and become the other(…)

I thought these lines sound like some of the more high-toned sections of Lord of the Rings. Gandalf, perhaps after smoking too much pipe-weed, lectures the hobbits about the evil inherent in magic rings, dark powers and that all that glitters is not gold. For here Bidart gives us here bones that are really cloaks that confer both invisibility (and visibility) as well as power and yet are also impossible to remove and able to maim but are really twins, twins that are stitched into the flesh, etc. I suspect that these dungeons-and-dragons bits are supposed to be metaphors, but to what end? Although the reader is being exhorted to do so twice in this section, understanding is the one thing that does not happen, at least for me.

Against the odds, this poem actually manages to ratchet up this grim intensity and thereby reach its nadir:

…Understand that when the beast within you

succeeds again in paralyzing into unending

incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make

its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its

rectitude…

I challenge the reader to recite these lines aloud. What in the world, or in the edgeless universe, is going on here? Bidart has produced what is very close to the unpronounceable. Even if you can manage to spit it out, I am not sure what it means: two clichés (“the beast within you” and “triumph is made sweeter”) are coupled to a pair of Latinate words (“temerity” and “rectitude”) and the headache-inducing phrase “unending incompletion.” What literary theory, what aesthetic, could defend this from the charge that it is one of the worst passages ever published by a major American poet?

Despite the overall disaster of it all, this is not to say that there is nothing of merit within this final section of the poem. Remarkably, the word “rectitude” above leads into what I consider the most promising part of the whole poem:

…It knows that it alone
knows you. It alone remembers your mother’s

mother’s grasping immigrant bewildered

stroke-filled slide-to-the-grave
you wiped from your adolescent American feet.

Your hick purer-than-thou overreaching veiling

mediocrity…

As with the dogs in the first section, the dying grandmother’s “slide-to-the-grave” is a point where something concrete anchors all those wounds and disinfectant, the paralysis and temerity. Despite the clumsy appearance of all those hyphenated constructions, this section manages moments of real authority, especially if you can forget that the “It” that starts it off is still “the beast within you.” The line “wiped from your adolescent American feet” is my favorite in the poem. This being said, Bidart’s carelessness does manifest itself throughout this section. In particular, “stroke-filled” is at the very least a clumsy way to describe something (the “slide-to-the-grave”); can anything or anyone really be “filled” with strokes. Yes, I understand what he intends, but how poorly he phrases it. Risking the obvious, I must also point out that “overreaching veiling mediocrity…” is clumsy nonsense.

***

That's all folks. In my original essay, I grouse on for several more pages, but I'm outta room. For what good it'll do me or American Poetry or Frank Bidart.

[Ramzzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this collection, only "The Three Hours of The Night" stands in precise precision and true poetic passion. I see the other poems lacking both in motif and philosophy, although the music really is resonant.

I further fancy this collection as his 'call-to-arms' to create more art, and it somehow pushes the blaze of his poetic persona down the drain because creating, just creating seems to be an American dream. A capitalist dwelling which not impart soul, critical perception and compassion to the collection and his readers. Its central poem nevertheless, "Three Hours" is exotic in form, and had a modernist direct approach, akin to a Poundian grasp of language and various cultures, which is at least, more than a consolation to this collection of some unnecessary American verses.

[Jae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read in one sitting and thoroughly enjoyed it. One of the first poetry books I've picked up in years and I am happy I did. Four stars.

[Laurel Lane · Rating 1 out of 5]

What did i just read??

[Michael Gossett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought the first one-third of the book was significantly better than the latter two-thirds. I admire Bidart's devotion to shiftiness and subversion (of poetic norms, at least) but can't help thinking that sometimes he over-relies on little schticks that have worn out their welcome (e.g. the call and response, the italicized 'other' voice). Glad I read it once: Bidart's a good poet to experience.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) This is a heady collection that demands rereading, and even then sections make no compromises. Bidart, like other poets after becoming established, is not interested in meeting the reader, the gourmand halfway. Still, I can trek uptown to his neighborhood when he's cooking up these dishes (where every bite, every taste is different from the last). My favorite new line: "Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves."

[Kaitlyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

(1.5) this collection has won countless awards, but it did not hit home for me at all. It didn't feel like a collection and at times felt like it was trying too hard. The pieces I liked the most were the simple, genuine ones. However, there were only a couple of those throughout.

[DilanAc · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think that this is a masterpiece. The Third Hour of The Night will be a poem read 100 years from now.

[Sö Lala · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was definitely worth the reread and the amount of sticky notes used. I went into this the first time knowing very little about Frank Bidart and his philosophy. I connected to many of the themes right away, the urge of human beings to create, the critic of the capitalist system, the morbid idea of death, gay love etc., but I found myself getting lost during “The Third Hour of the Night” the first time around. Now this might have been because I read it all in one sitting and hadn’t had the time to reflect on the overall themes and ideas of Bidart’s poetry yet, but while being able to follow the almost 40 page long poem surprisingly well for someone who had as good as no knowledge on Benvenuto before, I found myself bored and wondered what I was supposed to get out of his biography. Equipped with color coded sticky notes, I went back and reread Stardust almost a month later. I had worked out a pretty clear idea of Bidart’s world view and read some articles to fill in my blanks. Nevertheless, I was ready to once again enjoy the “Music Like Dirt” part, but to be left cold by “The Third Hour of the Night”. I was not. In the new context, Benvenuto’s story was the perfect connection of all the themes Bidart sets up in his shorter poems previous to this one and proved Bidart’s talent to connect and discover what he believes life is about in everything. I will definitely not stop thinking about this and probably bring it up in future intellectually stimulating/existential crisis evoking 3AM conversations.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just not my cup of tea for poetry. It’s a little too high brow, a lot of references to events/people/music that I have no connection with. Also, the final piece is about 40 pages long and I just have no patience for that, to be quite honest. I did like the title poem, “Star Dust” and maybe a few others, but overall it just wasn’t for me. I can see the appeal for others, and there were some excellent line breaks and vocabulary. There were also some interesting uses of repetition that reminded me of a couple potential forms, but never seemed to follow them entirely. My preference is with confessional/contemporary poets, and this just did not strike a chord with me.

[elise amaryllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5
i really liked this book. honestly i think if it weren't for the last poem, the third hour of the night, i would've given it five stars—but that poem dragged on for so long and it dulled my enjoyment.

my favs:
- music like dirt
- young marx (!!!)
- little fugue
- advice to the players
- stanzas ending with the same two words
- heart beat
- lament for the makers
- curse
- knot
- phenomenology of the prick
- the soldier who guards the frontier
- song

[Nadina · Rating 1 out of 5]

I pulled this from thebshelf at the library without giving it too much of a glance, other than it was poetry. I read a couple of poems but gave up. I was personally just not a fan of the language, style, words, etc. It just wasn't for me and I was not up for forcing my way through the whole collection.

[makenna dykstra · Rating 4 out of 5]

really enjoyed “young marx” & “third hour of the night”! bidart’s ability to enter a historical scene & embody, imagine, convey, explore it is so compelling & lovely. “third hour” was especially special, having just seen cellini’s perseus in florence, now reading the mythology of the statue’s creation 😯

[Aaron Marsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely incredible. Many poems moved me to tears. So glad I've started reading poetry again! Now my only concern is finding new poets that speak directly to me like Bidart and Lerner have this year. Dazzling in every way.

(A)

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

I think I might've liked this a lot more at a different period of my life. It's poetry that's deeply concerned with being an artist; you can hear the echo of different art forms in every poem. "The Third Hour of the Night" lost me at points but always drew me back in.

[Corin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Danielle Routh · Rating 3 out of 5]

This style and format of poetry isn't quite my cup of tea, but I can appreciate Bidart's artifice and voice, especially in his shorter poems.

[Jeneva Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite volume of Bidart's work.

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 3 out of 5]

(I didn't finish it, don't tell the poetry gods). I liked what I read, but it just wasn't the right book for me at the right time.

[Cone · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strange and beautiful book of poems about the human condition, the need to create, and the need to be. Bidart is truly unique.