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Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
The collected works of one of contemporary poetry’s most original voices
Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.
Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,” still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.”
Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s collected works are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.
Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child-murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us and inside us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and appetites of our experience.
Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet austerely surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,” still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.”
Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s collected works are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.
736 pages, Hardcover
First published August 15, 2017
170 people are currently reading
3296 people want to read
About the author
Frank Bidart
49 books141 followersFrank 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.
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June 9, 2025
What we create often creates us. For a poet, the poetry becomes their legacy and, for a poet like Frank Bidart who’s collected poems, Half-Life: 1965-2016, won him both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, this is quite the honorable legacy to have created. ‘Two things alone cross the illimitable distance / between the great and the rest of / us, who serve them,’ Bidart writes, ‘a knife; and art.’ While art is hardly a deadly weapon in the way a knife is—one would hardly charge a trench of soldiers armed with nothing but a paintbrush and poems—words can have just as much power. Where a knife can maim or kill, art can give life or heal. And there is much healing to be found in Bidart’s works. Openly queer, he crafts harrowing and heartbreaking tales of queerness under an oppressive society or creates characters such as his famous poem,
Ellen West
, to tell a narrative in which empathy can pour forth. ‘Part of his effectiveness comes simply from his ability as a storyteller,’ Michael Dirda wrote about Bidart, ‘You long to discover what happens to his poor, doomed people.’ These people come alive here in Half-Light, collecting 6 volumes of previously published poetry with a handful of new verse and interviews, making this an incredible collected works volume with a heart that still manages to be larger than this massive tome.
Queer
Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything
so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.
But lie to yourself, what you will
lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.
*
For each gay kid whose adolescence
was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial
scenario
forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.
*
Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
*
Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative
designed to confer existence.
If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not
me, but herself.
The door through which you were shoved out
into the light
was self-loathing and terror.
*
Thank you, terror!
You learned early that adults’ genteel
fantasies about human life
were not, for you, life. You think sex
is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.
Bidart is an incredible poet with a rather signature style that allows space and punctuation to participate in the experience of the poems. While I love Bidart’s work, I do understand how it could possibly not be for everyone and his experimental form is a large part of this. It makes for rather long poems due to the use of space though it also imbues a unique texture to the poetry that almost grants a physical shape and in interviews, Bidart has explained how it was the best method he has discovered to ‘express the relative weight and importance of the parts of a sentence.’ Such as the above poem where stressed and unstressed sentences appear in font changes that create a sense of multiple voices as well.
This also becomes an element of his storytelling that helps it become so engaging and dynamic. While much of his work is what is commonly considered ‘confessional’ poetry, Bidart likes to work through the voices of characters as well as a fictionalized autobiographical speaker. We have figures from real life such as Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky or artist Benvenuto Cellini, or even fictional characters like the aforementioned Ellen West and one of his more famous works, Herbert White written from the point of view of a sociopath who concludes ‘Hell came when I saw / MYSELF… / and couldn't stand / what I see…’ Even in the voices of his most despicable characters, Bidart is able to inject a feeling of empathy and pathos that in impeccably well orchestrated. This poems are often painful, yet we are better for it.
‘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.’
—From The Third Hour of the Night
‘We are queers of the universe’ Bidart writes and exploring queer identity is a major aspect of his work. It is often heartbreaking, such as in To the Dead where he writes ‘The love I've known is the love of / two people staring / not at each other, but in the same direction.’ Having to hide love is to have to deny oneself, which is horrifyingly sad, but Bidart examines it with grace such as in the titular poem, Half-Light:
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.
There is a sense of empowerment in many of his poems as well, however, and Bidart reaches out with words like a kind hand to those in need. His poetry demonstrates a sense of solidarity and community. Bidart ensures that we know we are not alone and do not suffer the hurt alone either, and that makes these poems so very beautiful and worthwhile.
Once I have the voice
that’s
the line
and at
the end
of the line
is a hook
and attached
to that
is the soul.
—From Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger
Through poems that are raw, poems that have teeth, poems that hurt and poems that heal, Frank Bidart’s Half-Life: Collected Poems 1965-2016 is a marvelous collection. These are poems that wrestle with identity, that grapple with issues of the body, of love, and the terror of living, but these are also poems that show support and community and give queer voices a space to be heard and valued. Bidart is a wonderful poet and this is an incredible collection.
4.5/5
Visions at 74
The planet turns there without you, beautiful.
Exiled by death you cannot
touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates
lived out and discarded, something crowded
inside us always craving to become something
glistening outside us, the relentless planet
showing itself the logic of what is
buried inside it. To love existence
is to love what is indifferent to you
you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful.
World that can know itself only by
world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars.
You are an hypothesis made of flesh.
What you will teach the stars is constant
rage at the constant prospect of not-being.
Queer
Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything
so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.
But lie to yourself, what you will
lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.
*
For each gay kid whose adolescence
was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial
scenario
forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.
*
Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
*
Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative
designed to confer existence.
If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not
me, but herself.
The door through which you were shoved out
into the light
was self-loathing and terror.
*
Thank you, terror!
You learned early that adults’ genteel
fantasies about human life
were not, for you, life. You think sex
is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.
Bidart is an incredible poet with a rather signature style that allows space and punctuation to participate in the experience of the poems. While I love Bidart’s work, I do understand how it could possibly not be for everyone and his experimental form is a large part of this. It makes for rather long poems due to the use of space though it also imbues a unique texture to the poetry that almost grants a physical shape and in interviews, Bidart has explained how it was the best method he has discovered to ‘express the relative weight and importance of the parts of a sentence.’ Such as the above poem where stressed and unstressed sentences appear in font changes that create a sense of multiple voices as well.
‘Punctuation allows me to ‘lay out’ the bones of a sentence visually, spatially, so that the reader can see the pauses, emphases, urgencies and languors in the voice.’
This also becomes an element of his storytelling that helps it become so engaging and dynamic. While much of his work is what is commonly considered ‘confessional’ poetry, Bidart likes to work through the voices of characters as well as a fictionalized autobiographical speaker. We have figures from real life such as Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky or artist Benvenuto Cellini, or even fictional characters like the aforementioned Ellen West and one of his more famous works, Herbert White written from the point of view of a sociopath who concludes ‘Hell came when I saw / MYSELF… / and couldn't stand / what I see…’ Even in the voices of his most despicable characters, Bidart is able to inject a feeling of empathy and pathos that in impeccably well orchestrated. This poems are often painful, yet we are better for it.
‘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.’
—From The Third Hour of the Night
‘We are queers of the universe’ Bidart writes and exploring queer identity is a major aspect of his work. It is often heartbreaking, such as in To the Dead where he writes ‘The love I've known is the love of / two people staring / not at each other, but in the same direction.’ Having to hide love is to have to deny oneself, which is horrifyingly sad, but Bidart examines it with grace such as in the titular poem, Half-Light:
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.
There is a sense of empowerment in many of his poems as well, however, and Bidart reaches out with words like a kind hand to those in need. His poetry demonstrates a sense of solidarity and community. Bidart ensures that we know we are not alone and do not suffer the hurt alone either, and that makes these poems so very beautiful and worthwhile.
Once I have the voice
that’s
the line
and at
the end
of the line
is a hook
and attached
to that
is the soul.
—From Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger
Through poems that are raw, poems that have teeth, poems that hurt and poems that heal, Frank Bidart’s Half-Life: Collected Poems 1965-2016 is a marvelous collection. These are poems that wrestle with identity, that grapple with issues of the body, of love, and the terror of living, but these are also poems that show support and community and give queer voices a space to be heard and valued. Bidart is a wonderful poet and this is an incredible collection.
4.5/5
Visions at 74
The planet turns there without you, beautiful.
Exiled by death you cannot
touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates
lived out and discarded, something crowded
inside us always craving to become something
glistening outside us, the relentless planet
showing itself the logic of what is
buried inside it. To love existence
is to love what is indifferent to you
you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful.
World that can know itself only by
world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars.
You are an hypothesis made of flesh.
What you will teach the stars is constant
rage at the constant prospect of not-being.
September 10, 2017
Poem Ending With a Sentence by
Heath Ledger
Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed to
centerlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated
his
mouth, he has mastered to mutilate
you: the Joker’s voice, so unlike
the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar.
Once I have the voice
that’s
the line
and at
the end
of the line
is a hook
and attached
to that
is the soul.
Heath Ledger
Each grinding flattened American vowel smashed to
centerlessness, his glee that whatever long ago mutilated
his
mouth, he has mastered to mutilate
you: the Joker’s voice, so unlike
the bruised, withheld, wounded voice of Ennis Del Mar.
Once I have the voice
that’s
the line
and at
the end
of the line
is a hook
and attached
to that
is the soul.
March 8, 2025
The Title Poem:
Half-Light
by Frank Bidart
That crazy drunken night I
maneuvered you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d never seen a sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful
look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone
tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter
that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn’t
give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.
*
The above poem was my favorite. Here is a problem I had with a few other poems. The very first poem "To the Dead" has a great last line:
The love I've known is the love of / two people staring / not at each other, but in the same direction.
Great, right? Then I check out the footnotes that say those lines are "stolen, ultimately, from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Night Flight." What's that all about? I have heard it said that great poets steal. But this just looks like plagiarism to me. The author adds nothing much to the lines to deserve any credit. And it is not a cento poem with other quotes.
*
If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove
by Frank Bidart (from The New Yorker)
It is what recurs that we believe,
your face not at one moment looking
sideways up at me anguished or
elate, but the old words welling up by
gravity rearranged:
two weeks before you died in
pain worn out, after my usual casual sign-off
with All my love, your simple
solemn My love to you, Frank.
*
And here is a link to three poems I like at Pen America:
https://pen.org/three-poems-from-star...
*
If See No End In Is
BY FRANK BIDART
What none knows is when, not if.
Now that your life nears its end
when you turn back what you see
is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No,
it is a vast resonating chamber in
which each thing you say or do is
new, but the same. What none knows is
how to change. Each plateau you reach, if
single, limited, only itself, in-
cludes traces of all the others, so that in the end
limitation frees you, there is no
end, if you once see what is there to see.
You cannot see what is there to see —
not when she whose love you failed is
standing next to you. Then, as if refusing the know-
ledge that life unseparated from her is death, as if
again scorning your refusals, she turns away. The end
achieved by the unappeased is burial within.
Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within
whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see
by what necessity the double-bind is in the end
the figure for human life, why what we love is
precluded always by something else we love, as if
each no we speak is yes, each yes no.
The prospect is mixed but elsewhere the forecast is no
better. The eyrie where you perch in
exhaustion has food and is out of the wind, if
cold. You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the sea
for movement, though the promise of sex or food is
the prospect that bewildered you to this end.
Something in you believes that it is not the end.
When you wake, sixth grade will start. The finite you know
you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is
what you should not love, which endless bullies in-
tuit unerringly. The future will be different: you cannot see
the end. What none knows is when, not if.
Source: Poetry (October 2007)
Here he is reading the poem and discussing the sestina:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE0M6...
*
For the AIDS Dead
By FRANK BIDART
The plague you have thus far survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.
Writing a poem, I cleave to “you.” You
means I, one, you, as well as the you
inside you constantly talk to. Without
justice or logic, without
sense, you survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.
*
Visions at 74
BY FRANK BIDART
The planet turns there without you, beautiful.
Exiled by death you cannot
touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates
lived out and discarded, something crowded
inside us always craving to become something
glistening outside us, the relentless planet
showing itself the logic of what is
buried inside it. To love existence
is to love what is indifferent to you
you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful.
World that can know itself only by
world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars.
You are an hypothesis made of flesh.
What you will teach the stars is constant
rage at the constant prospect of not-being.
•
Sometimes when I wake it's because I hear
a knock. Knock,
Knock. Two
knocks, quite clear.
I wake and listen. It's nothing.
*
My rating of 4 stars probably does not reflect accurately my feelings about the book as a whole. More like 2 or 3 stars. But the poems I liked were excellent.
Half-Light
by Frank Bidart
That crazy drunken night I
maneuvered you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d never seen a sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful
look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone
tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter
that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn’t
give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.
*
The above poem was my favorite. Here is a problem I had with a few other poems. The very first poem "To the Dead" has a great last line:
The love I've known is the love of / two people staring / not at each other, but in the same direction.
Great, right? Then I check out the footnotes that say those lines are "stolen, ultimately, from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Night Flight." What's that all about? I have heard it said that great poets steal. But this just looks like plagiarism to me. The author adds nothing much to the lines to deserve any credit. And it is not a cento poem with other quotes.
*
If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove
by Frank Bidart (from The New Yorker)
It is what recurs that we believe,
your face not at one moment looking
sideways up at me anguished or
elate, but the old words welling up by
gravity rearranged:
two weeks before you died in
pain worn out, after my usual casual sign-off
with All my love, your simple
solemn My love to you, Frank.
*
And here is a link to three poems I like at Pen America:
https://pen.org/three-poems-from-star...
*
If See No End In Is
BY FRANK BIDART
What none knows is when, not if.
Now that your life nears its end
when you turn back what you see
is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No,
it is a vast resonating chamber in
which each thing you say or do is
new, but the same. What none knows is
how to change. Each plateau you reach, if
single, limited, only itself, in-
cludes traces of all the others, so that in the end
limitation frees you, there is no
end, if you once see what is there to see.
You cannot see what is there to see —
not when she whose love you failed is
standing next to you. Then, as if refusing the know-
ledge that life unseparated from her is death, as if
again scorning your refusals, she turns away. The end
achieved by the unappeased is burial within.
Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within
whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see
by what necessity the double-bind is in the end
the figure for human life, why what we love is
precluded always by something else we love, as if
each no we speak is yes, each yes no.
The prospect is mixed but elsewhere the forecast is no
better. The eyrie where you perch in
exhaustion has food and is out of the wind, if
cold. You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the sea
for movement, though the promise of sex or food is
the prospect that bewildered you to this end.
Something in you believes that it is not the end.
When you wake, sixth grade will start. The finite you know
you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is
what you should not love, which endless bullies in-
tuit unerringly. The future will be different: you cannot see
the end. What none knows is when, not if.
Source: Poetry (October 2007)
Here he is reading the poem and discussing the sestina:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE0M6...
*
For the AIDS Dead
By FRANK BIDART
The plague you have thus far survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.
Writing a poem, I cleave to “you.” You
means I, one, you, as well as the you
inside you constantly talk to. Without
justice or logic, without
sense, you survived. They didn’t.
Nothing that they did in bed that you didn’t.
*
Visions at 74
BY FRANK BIDART
The planet turns there without you, beautiful.
Exiled by death you cannot
touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates
lived out and discarded, something crowded
inside us always craving to become something
glistening outside us, the relentless planet
showing itself the logic of what is
buried inside it. To love existence
is to love what is indifferent to you
you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful.
World that can know itself only by
world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars.
You are an hypothesis made of flesh.
What you will teach the stars is constant
rage at the constant prospect of not-being.
•
Sometimes when I wake it's because I hear
a knock. Knock,
Knock. Two
knocks, quite clear.
I wake and listen. It's nothing.
*
My rating of 4 stars probably does not reflect accurately my feelings about the book as a whole. More like 2 or 3 stars. But the poems I liked were excellent.
November 28, 2023
Half-Light is a collection of six poetry novels written by Frank Bidart. After having read all six of them, these are the quotes that stood out to me the most:
• "God said: GOD MADE YOU. GOD DOES NOT CARE IF YOU ARE "GUILTY" OR NOT.
I said: I CARE IF I AM GUILTY! I CARE IF I AM GUILTY! God was silent. Everything was SILENT. I lay back down in the snow."
• "Then the voice in my head said, whether you love what you love, or live in ceaseless revolt against it - what you love is your fate."
• "There is no answer to your life. You are insane; or evil."
• "measured against the immeasurable universe, no word you have spoken brought light. Brought light to what, as a child, you thought too dark to be survived."
• "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."
• "You are listening to a soul that has always been SICK WITH ENVY..."
• "Our not-love is like a man running down / a mountain, who, if he dares to try to stop,/ falls over--/ my hands wanted to touch your hands / because we had hands."
• "God said: GOD MADE YOU. GOD DOES NOT CARE IF YOU ARE "GUILTY" OR NOT.
I said: I CARE IF I AM GUILTY! I CARE IF I AM GUILTY! God was silent. Everything was SILENT. I lay back down in the snow."
• "Then the voice in my head said, whether you love what you love, or live in ceaseless revolt against it - what you love is your fate."
• "There is no answer to your life. You are insane; or evil."
• "measured against the immeasurable universe, no word you have spoken brought light. Brought light to what, as a child, you thought too dark to be survived."
• "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."
• "You are listening to a soul that has always been SICK WITH ENVY..."
• "Our not-love is like a man running down / a mountain, who, if he dares to try to stop,/ falls over--/ my hands wanted to touch your hands / because we had hands."
January 12, 2018
After 700 pages, with this collection I’ve finally finished all the books on the National Book Award shortlist for poetry. This one won the award, but it is my least favorite of the five. While there were many poems here that I loved, I also found many, particularly the earlier poems, much less accessible than the contemporary poetry from the other collections on the shortlist.
October 20, 2025
Half-Light felt like getting smacked with feelings I didn’t know I still had- in the gentlest way possible. It’s quiet and honest, and somehow makes being sad feel okay for a little while.
April 7, 2020
This book’s so damn good... TT___TT Frank Bidart, I really am fond of your poems!
“Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative
designed to confer existence.
If I had managed to came out to my
mother, she would have blamed not
me, but herself.”
— Frank Bidart, Queer
“Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative
designed to confer existence.
If I had managed to came out to my
mother, she would have blamed not
me, but herself.”
— Frank Bidart, Queer
August 28, 2024
Other than a poem here or there, this was the first instance where I’d spent any amount of time with Frank Bidart’s. These poems are challenging, and interesting, and funny, and heartfelt. It almost feels necessary to look at his work on a larger scale because it changes and evolves so much from one collection to the other.
I didn’t love everything, but it would be silly to expect to love everything in what’s basically an overview of somebody’s career. There are pieces in this that I’ll absolutely be returning to.
I didn’t love everything, but it would be silly to expect to love everything in what’s basically an overview of somebody’s career. There are pieces in this that I’ll absolutely be returning to.
September 29, 2023
meget fin. To the Dead, Two Men, og In the Ruins satte sig direkte i min sjæl.
March 14, 2022
Do yourself a real favor — go read this collection now. This one is my favorite and I can’t stop re-reading it. It is now among my all-time favorite poems. I love how deeply sad and oddly hilarious it is. Even the simplicity of its structure is part of the poem’s accompanying humor and sadness.
Half-Light
That crazy drunken night I
maneuvered you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d never seen a sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful
look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone
tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter
that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn’t
give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.
Half-Light
That crazy drunken night I
maneuvered you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d never seen a sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful
look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone
tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter
that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn’t
give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.
February 2, 2018
Bidart's poetry is often studied in contraries, and this juxtaposition is not always easily accessible. Short-lined, long poems. Elliptical abstractions paired with motion and bodily movement. Bidart's goal is often to force empathy on us--to make the strange seem personally accessible and the almost make the personally accessible seem strange. Half-light includes all of Bidart's prior collections as well as his newest one. Bidart requires, however, a patience for obscure voices and obscure frames of reference. Generally, his work is worth looking for the classical and contemporary references. Definitely worth the price of the collection, but I am not sure every reader, even every reader of poetry, would be willing to go where Bidart wants to take them.
November 6, 2018
I didn't have as much time as I wanted to spend in the landscapes of Bidart's poems. Do any of us have that kind of time? A long but solid collection.
July 4, 2023
The poems in Half-light present an enormous scope of human experience. Many explore the poet’s own desires, fears, regrets, habits, and fate as a mortal being. Frank Bidart is not just a convenient subject for Frank Bidart - he is an inexhaustible source of questions and hypotheses about what it means to inhabit a human body. He also finds plenty of external, non-self sources for his poems: desperate fictional characters, larger-than-life historical figures, artists, classical music, ballet, and even other texts that he reanimates by giving them a new form in verse (some examples: Tacitus’ Annals of Imperial Rome and a selection from Genesis).
He is fond of using capitalization, colons followed immediately by hyphens, and various spacing techniques to “aerate” lines. One classic Frank Bidart layout is to have a long sequence of one-line stanzas, each separated by a centered bullet point. This setup lends each line a transient intensity as the reader is drawn from one stanza to the next.
Some of the poems are compact and pristinely conceptual, such as “Poem Ending with Three Lines from ‘Home on The Range’,” and “Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger,” both of which are exactly what they say they are.
Others are 40-50 page narrative epics that send the reader careening through the history of ancient philosophy, Ovidian tragedy, the life of Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, the life of Gengis Khan. What’s really remarkable about the BIG poems is how accessible they are, even to one who is not well schooled in their subject matter. While background research fed my curiosity to know more, I did not find it necessary on the first go through these poems. By “these poems,” I am talking about the four “Hours of Night” poems, which are evenly distributed through the collection and form a backbone for the volume. Bidart provides enough context to keep these researched poems comprehensible to the newcomer without weighing them down or detracting from their dramatic impact.
There are about 130 poems in Half-light, written between 1965 and 2016. There are helpful notes at the end that shed light on the poet’s sources for a given poem, when applicable. The poems are many, many things: raw, conceptual, sexual, intellectual, self-referential, vulnerable, whimsically surreal, violent, graphically physical (in one instance, a supernatural narrator uses “orchid juice” to murder and then reanimate a woman’s body in a most gruesome way - sadly there was no elaboration on this in the notes at the end). Again and again, the poems reach their most arresting culminations while confronting the problems and consequences of human embodiment.
He is fond of using capitalization, colons followed immediately by hyphens, and various spacing techniques to “aerate” lines. One classic Frank Bidart layout is to have a long sequence of one-line stanzas, each separated by a centered bullet point. This setup lends each line a transient intensity as the reader is drawn from one stanza to the next.
Some of the poems are compact and pristinely conceptual, such as “Poem Ending with Three Lines from ‘Home on The Range’,” and “Poem Ending with a Sentence by Heath Ledger,” both of which are exactly what they say they are.
Others are 40-50 page narrative epics that send the reader careening through the history of ancient philosophy, Ovidian tragedy, the life of Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, the life of Gengis Khan. What’s really remarkable about the BIG poems is how accessible they are, even to one who is not well schooled in their subject matter. While background research fed my curiosity to know more, I did not find it necessary on the first go through these poems. By “these poems,” I am talking about the four “Hours of Night” poems, which are evenly distributed through the collection and form a backbone for the volume. Bidart provides enough context to keep these researched poems comprehensible to the newcomer without weighing them down or detracting from their dramatic impact.
There are about 130 poems in Half-light, written between 1965 and 2016. There are helpful notes at the end that shed light on the poet’s sources for a given poem, when applicable. The poems are many, many things: raw, conceptual, sexual, intellectual, self-referential, vulnerable, whimsically surreal, violent, graphically physical (in one instance, a supernatural narrator uses “orchid juice” to murder and then reanimate a woman’s body in a most gruesome way - sadly there was no elaboration on this in the notes at the end). Again and again, the poems reach their most arresting culminations while confronting the problems and consequences of human embodiment.
November 6, 2024
Highly recommend the audiobook for this one — truly arresting to hear this guy read these. Dude is straight up wrestling language itself like Steve Irwin with a crocodile.
December 24, 2021
I absolutely love Frank Bidart’s personal and autobiographical poetry; “To The Dead,” “Confessional,” and “Golden State” are among my favorite poems. I also found “Herbert White” to be especially breathtaking as it opens a window into an unfamiliar consciousness and conscience. I can applaud his poems celebrating homosexual love as well for their sincere representation of his experience.
However, I tend to get lost in the landscapes created by Bidart’s longer pieces and lose interest! I agree with the readers of the October 2004 issue of Poetry magazine that The Third Hour of the Night (and all the Night poems) was too long, too esoteric, and not good enough for its own issue! I value difficult poems that force one to tease out meaning (whether intended by the writer or projected by the reader), but Bidart’s obscurantism annoys me. Bidart’s “taking on” of various personages perspective—Nijinsky and Ellen West for example—also does not appeal to me personally. I find that academia tends to applaud such constructions as erudite and I just cannot figure out why. It’s as if delving into the faux mentality of someone else in a dramatic monologue is more “heroic” (using the description of Bidart’s work from The NY Times Book Review) than your own. I selfishly wish Bidart had never reached a catharsis with his own demons (see page 699) and moved away from the autobiographical style of his earlier years!
I appreciated the notes and interview section in the book as it cast light on his thought process and intentions and fleshed out the text. I’m glad to have read this collection, but would not necessarily recommend it as a new purchase...buy it used....
However, I tend to get lost in the landscapes created by Bidart’s longer pieces and lose interest! I agree with the readers of the October 2004 issue of Poetry magazine that The Third Hour of the Night (and all the Night poems) was too long, too esoteric, and not good enough for its own issue! I value difficult poems that force one to tease out meaning (whether intended by the writer or projected by the reader), but Bidart’s obscurantism annoys me. Bidart’s “taking on” of various personages perspective—Nijinsky and Ellen West for example—also does not appeal to me personally. I find that academia tends to applaud such constructions as erudite and I just cannot figure out why. It’s as if delving into the faux mentality of someone else in a dramatic monologue is more “heroic” (using the description of Bidart’s work from The NY Times Book Review) than your own. I selfishly wish Bidart had never reached a catharsis with his own demons (see page 699) and moved away from the autobiographical style of his earlier years!
I appreciated the notes and interview section in the book as it cast light on his thought process and intentions and fleshed out the text. I’m glad to have read this collection, but would not necessarily recommend it as a new purchase...buy it used....
January 9, 2018
I'm quantifying, not judging, my rewarding experience through Bidart's work. I adore his two long poems "The First Hour of the Night" and "The Third Hour of the Night", but not the even hours. (I've rated all the volumes separately and named other favorite poems there.)
April 17, 2018
Congratulations, Frank Bidart, for winning this year's Pulitzer for poetry!
Here's a favorite from this amazing, challenging, inspiring collection, the title poem, "Half-Light":
That crazy drunken night I
maneuvered you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d never seen a sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful
look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone
tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter
that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn’t
give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.
Here's a favorite from this amazing, challenging, inspiring collection, the title poem, "Half-Light":
That crazy drunken night I
maneuvered you out into a field outside of
Coachella—I’d never seen a sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful
look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone
tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter
that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn’t
give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you
you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.
August 16, 2019
Bidart is one of the most fascinating and challenging poets I've ever not given up trying to read. If I'm being honest, there are maybe twenty poems in here that I can honestly say I liked, but every poem is a lesson, and when they work it is staggering. I'm normally kind of nonplussed by typographical experimentation in poetry, but Bidart's motivation isn't avant garde for the sake of avant garde, and there were moments where I could tune into what he was doing. His histories and dramatic monologues ("The War of Vaslav Nijinsky," "Ellen West," the second, third, and fourth "Hour[s] of the Night," to name a few), which can span well over 30 pages, are as impressive as they are emotionally devastating, and yet just when you think that he can only be really impactful in his long poems, you'll find "Valentine" or "Rio." If you write, or want to write, lyric poetry, or experimental poetry, or persona poems, or historical poems, you have to read this book.
May 28, 2018
Finally read Bidart after having taken all of his classes while at Wellesley! Liked his later poems much more than his earlier ones, but loved having all of them together in one volume for comparison.
February 11, 2019
my favorite
May 15, 2024
Quotes:
"I said I was in need. You said / that the dead / rule and confuse our steps / that if I helped you cut your skin / deeply enough / that, at least, was IRREPARABLE..."
"My hands wanted to touch your hands / because we had hands."
"SHE LEAPS / BECAUSE SHE HATES THE GROUND."
"I said: / LIE DOWN IN THE SNOW / AND DIE. YOU ARE EVIL. / I lay down in the snow. / I tried to go to sleep. / My HANDS / began to get cold, to FREEZE. / I was lying there a long, long time. / I did not feel cold anymore. / Then, God said to me: / GO HOME / AND TELL YOUR WIFE YOU ARE INSANE."
"God said: / GOD MADE YOU. GOD DOES NOT CARE / IF YOU ARE "GUILTY" OR NOT. / I said: / I CARE IF I AM GUILTY! / I CARE IF I AM GUILTY!.../ God was silent. / Everything was SILENT. / I lay back down in the snow. / I wanted again to go to sleep, and die. / But my BODY did not want to die."
"I DENIED HER, LIVING"
The entire poem "IV. Light"
"Then I think, No. The ideal of being thin / conceals the ideal / not to have a body-; / which is NOT trivial."
"What parents leave you / is their lives."
"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. These are the instructions for the wrangler."
"After you were bitten by a wolf and transformed / into a monster who feeds on other human beings / each full moon and who, therefore, in disgust / wants to die, you think The desire to die is not / feeling suicidal. It abjures mere action. You have / wanted to die since the moment you were born."
"He was the only person she wanted to be with but he refused to / live down the block and then she died." (Referring to a mother and son)
"You are the leaping / dog / capricious on the grass, lunging / at something only it can see."
"I said I was in need. You said / that the dead / rule and confuse our steps / that if I helped you cut your skin / deeply enough / that, at least, was IRREPARABLE..."
"My hands wanted to touch your hands / because we had hands."
"SHE LEAPS / BECAUSE SHE HATES THE GROUND."
"I said: / LIE DOWN IN THE SNOW / AND DIE. YOU ARE EVIL. / I lay down in the snow. / I tried to go to sleep. / My HANDS / began to get cold, to FREEZE. / I was lying there a long, long time. / I did not feel cold anymore. / Then, God said to me: / GO HOME / AND TELL YOUR WIFE YOU ARE INSANE."
"God said: / GOD MADE YOU. GOD DOES NOT CARE / IF YOU ARE "GUILTY" OR NOT. / I said: / I CARE IF I AM GUILTY! / I CARE IF I AM GUILTY!.../ God was silent. / Everything was SILENT. / I lay back down in the snow. / I wanted again to go to sleep, and die. / But my BODY did not want to die."
"I DENIED HER, LIVING"
The entire poem "IV. Light"
"Then I think, No. The ideal of being thin / conceals the ideal / not to have a body-; / which is NOT trivial."
"What parents leave you / is their lives."
"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. These are the instructions for the wrangler."
"After you were bitten by a wolf and transformed / into a monster who feeds on other human beings / each full moon and who, therefore, in disgust / wants to die, you think The desire to die is not / feeling suicidal. It abjures mere action. You have / wanted to die since the moment you were born."
"He was the only person she wanted to be with but he refused to / live down the block and then she died." (Referring to a mother and son)
"You are the leaping / dog / capricious on the grass, lunging / at something only it can see."
December 29, 2019
I’ve spent the last year slowly making my way through this career-spanning collection of poems. I was not really a poetry connoisseur, but was drawn by the fanfare and awards surrounding this collection when it came out. I found Bidart’s poetry to be almost indescribably rich and rewarding. I also found his work very challenging, and benefitted tremendously from a) moving through the collection slowly and b) reading analytic and review essays online along with the poems themselves.
It is hard to summarize Bidart’s body of work. He is apparently best known for the visceral and disturbing content of older narrative poems “Herbert White” (about a child murderer) and “Ellen West” (about an anorexic). Neither of these ranked anywhere near my top picks for his best work, though I mean that as a compliment to his broader body of work rather than a critique of those poems. A constant and overarching theme in Bidart’s work is what he clearly sees as the ultimately unresolvable tension between our metaphysical images of the ideal (driving our desires, urges, etc) and the limitations of our physical existence (our bodies, our mortality, etc).
To borrow a phrase from one helpful review essay I read, the characters in Bidart’s poems - which range from himself to Marilyn Monroe to even Genghis Khan - act as “embodiments” of these core dilemmas of “being.” This is probably best captured in his famous long narrative poems, of which my favorites were “The War of Vaslav Najinsky” and the four “Hours of the Night” poems.
However, so much else in this collection defies simple categorization and demands careful reading and re-reading. The different books in the collection deal with themes ranging from personal examination and biography (Golden State) to the physical body (Book of the Body), guilt (The Sacrifice), desire (Desire), creation (Star Dust), and art (Watching the Spring Festival).
I can think of very few writers who have so much of value and interest to say on so many things as Bidart. What a mind, and what a gift for the reader.
It is hard to summarize Bidart’s body of work. He is apparently best known for the visceral and disturbing content of older narrative poems “Herbert White” (about a child murderer) and “Ellen West” (about an anorexic). Neither of these ranked anywhere near my top picks for his best work, though I mean that as a compliment to his broader body of work rather than a critique of those poems. A constant and overarching theme in Bidart’s work is what he clearly sees as the ultimately unresolvable tension between our metaphysical images of the ideal (driving our desires, urges, etc) and the limitations of our physical existence (our bodies, our mortality, etc).
To borrow a phrase from one helpful review essay I read, the characters in Bidart’s poems - which range from himself to Marilyn Monroe to even Genghis Khan - act as “embodiments” of these core dilemmas of “being.” This is probably best captured in his famous long narrative poems, of which my favorites were “The War of Vaslav Najinsky” and the four “Hours of the Night” poems.
However, so much else in this collection defies simple categorization and demands careful reading and re-reading. The different books in the collection deal with themes ranging from personal examination and biography (Golden State) to the physical body (Book of the Body), guilt (The Sacrifice), desire (Desire), creation (Star Dust), and art (Watching the Spring Festival).
I can think of very few writers who have so much of value and interest to say on so many things as Bidart. What a mind, and what a gift for the reader.
February 27, 2025
Some works are better felt than dissected, analyzed, and judged. Half-light: Collectd Poems is one of those books for me. I've always treated poetry as an art that when done well, will hit where it is meant to hit and that's exactly what I found with Frank Bidart.
I spent a little over a year tackling this collection on the recommendation of a cousin. Not because the content was that challenging (it also was), but because it is worthbreading slowly. One poem here, a stanza chewed upon for a day there, and we're suddenly at a year. This is a collection of poems that will touch the human experience whether you understand the structure or not.
I spent a little over a year tackling this collection on the recommendation of a cousin. Not because the content was that challenging (it also was), but because it is worthbreading slowly. One poem here, a stanza chewed upon for a day there, and we're suddenly at a year. This is a collection of poems that will touch the human experience whether you understand the structure or not.
September 13, 2024
BOOM! Big ass book of big ass beautiful poems!
I have been taken on a candlelit journey through the human psyche, and I have not yet come out of it.
This compiles his whole career, and it’s super satisfying to read in order, seeing his development over time. And I don’t mean to talk about improvement, more his development of the handful of his most important ideas; he revisits ideas across decades: series, rewritings, and the interwoven repetition of a few real good symbols. I recommend any and all of this :)
I have been taken on a candlelit journey through the human psyche, and I have not yet come out of it.
This compiles his whole career, and it’s super satisfying to read in order, seeing his development over time. And I don’t mean to talk about improvement, more his development of the handful of his most important ideas; he revisits ideas across decades: series, rewritings, and the interwoven repetition of a few real good symbols. I recommend any and all of this :)
January 14, 2021
"To love existence is to love what is indifferent to you"
This collection of Bidart's entire career sat on my nightstand for a year and a half. The early poems are word mazes. Demand constant rereading and are structurally challenging
They read,
They as in the
Early
Poems read
Like.... This
Which produces mixed results. At times it provides alternate interpretations and ways of perceiving words. At other times it makes a poem incomprehensible. As other reviews have noted, Bidart's poetry becomes noticably more palatable as it goes on. I'd say I was absolutely blown away by his post-2013 poetry. Before that felt like I was in over my head for my first real dive into poetry. Ultimately, Bidart has some excellent works and it felt really intimate to read through a collection of all of his work where you are able to pick up on recurring themes, learn what Frank's psyche fixates on, and reflect on what I, myself, fixate on.
This collection of Bidart's entire career sat on my nightstand for a year and a half. The early poems are word mazes. Demand constant rereading and are structurally challenging
They read,
They as in the
Early
Poems read
Like.... This
Which produces mixed results. At times it provides alternate interpretations and ways of perceiving words. At other times it makes a poem incomprehensible. As other reviews have noted, Bidart's poetry becomes noticably more palatable as it goes on. I'd say I was absolutely blown away by his post-2013 poetry. Before that felt like I was in over my head for my first real dive into poetry. Ultimately, Bidart has some excellent works and it felt really intimate to read through a collection of all of his work where you are able to pick up on recurring themes, learn what Frank's psyche fixates on, and reflect on what I, myself, fixate on.
March 25, 2025
This was a sprint.
Bidart is a genius who I may not fully understand.
Bidart is a genius who I may not fully understand.
January 28, 2018
This is the best book of poetry I have ever read in my life. It follows the scope of Bidart's writing from early in his life till the present day. There are widely varied and unique poems - some short and some epic. I love the way he incorporates classical art and history into the longer ones. The author must have a vast amount of knowledge on a plethora of topics. The cover shows a Cellini sculpture of Perseus cutting off the head of Medusa which figures significantly in one of his longer works. What is so wonderful is the consistent excellency of his work. Bidart is truly an American treasure.
May 1, 2021
is it weird to send a poet fanmail
Read
April 16, 2023Help me out by also reading these poems.
March 3, 2022
This is a Big Book of poetry in many ways. From the opening pages, I immediately began highlighting lines, 'Insanity is the insistence on meaning' (The Arc, a poem from the perspective of an amputee), and 'It's in many ways / a relief to have you dead' (Golden State, a milestone poem in self-honesty, one of Bidart's many poems about his parents, whose disappointments and delusions he grasps with painful sincerity).
There is a deceptive looseness in the structure of Bidart's poems: the lines are well spaced allowing for breath and movement so that, even when the poems are long and dialectical, and employ historical, artistic and philosophical references, like the brilliant Hour of the Night sequences, they do not feel dense or linguistically difficult; unpacking the meaning is a fluid, joyful process, and one that is ultimately rewarding.
In, Ellen West (whose late nineteenth century case of anorexia is well-known), Bidart alternates between Ellen's voice, in verse, and that of the doctor, in prose poetry. The structure is a perfect mirror for the battle of wills between doctor and patient, as well as the rational and supposedly irrational. Which one is which?
Bidart's poems are often a journey from the theoretical to the personal, constantly exploring the tension between the material and the insubstantial, the body and the mind, the human predicament embodied in our 'hunger for the absolute' contrasted with its impossibility. I enjoy this analytical aspect of Bidart's work, and the range of subject matter out of which he extracts his themes, from his other great character poem, Herbert White, which inhabits the mind of a necrophiliac serial killer, to the genius and inner stuggle of Nijinsky (The War of Vaslav Nijinsky), to Raphael's great painting, School of Athens (First Hour of the Night), Cellini's terrifyingly beautiful, Perseus with the Head of Medusa (Third Hour of the Night), or Genghis Khan (Fourth Hour of the Night), and the question of slavery versus power, the need to extend control even after death.
It is as if Why is the central question of Bidart's work. Of course, like all philosophy, the point is to ask the question; the answer, Bidart seems to say, is the poem, the art. At the end of Collected Poems, there is a fascinating interview in which Bidet discusses how form, line, punctuation, syntax, down to actual prosody is sculpted through this inner expression of truth. He refers to the Scottish poet William Dunbar's poem, Lament for the Makars, and the origin of the word, 'Makar,' as applying to poets as makers, 'in which making is seen in the context of the other [human] processes.'
To read Bidart is to take a journey through yourself.
There is a deceptive looseness in the structure of Bidart's poems: the lines are well spaced allowing for breath and movement so that, even when the poems are long and dialectical, and employ historical, artistic and philosophical references, like the brilliant Hour of the Night sequences, they do not feel dense or linguistically difficult; unpacking the meaning is a fluid, joyful process, and one that is ultimately rewarding.
In, Ellen West (whose late nineteenth century case of anorexia is well-known), Bidart alternates between Ellen's voice, in verse, and that of the doctor, in prose poetry. The structure is a perfect mirror for the battle of wills between doctor and patient, as well as the rational and supposedly irrational. Which one is which?
Bidart's poems are often a journey from the theoretical to the personal, constantly exploring the tension between the material and the insubstantial, the body and the mind, the human predicament embodied in our 'hunger for the absolute' contrasted with its impossibility. I enjoy this analytical aspect of Bidart's work, and the range of subject matter out of which he extracts his themes, from his other great character poem, Herbert White, which inhabits the mind of a necrophiliac serial killer, to the genius and inner stuggle of Nijinsky (The War of Vaslav Nijinsky), to Raphael's great painting, School of Athens (First Hour of the Night), Cellini's terrifyingly beautiful, Perseus with the Head of Medusa (Third Hour of the Night), or Genghis Khan (Fourth Hour of the Night), and the question of slavery versus power, the need to extend control even after death.
It is as if Why is the central question of Bidart's work. Of course, like all philosophy, the point is to ask the question; the answer, Bidart seems to say, is the poem, the art. At the end of Collected Poems, there is a fascinating interview in which Bidet discusses how form, line, punctuation, syntax, down to actual prosody is sculpted through this inner expression of truth. He refers to the Scottish poet William Dunbar's poem, Lament for the Makars, and the origin of the word, 'Makar,' as applying to poets as makers, 'in which making is seen in the context of the other [human] processes.'
To read Bidart is to take a journey through yourself.
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