★ 07/17/2017
Reviewed by Craig Morgan Teicher Throughout his long and celebrated career, Bidart has conducted a single-minded exploration of the sources and meanings of emotional intensity, the passions, fears, and cravings that drive people to do what we do, often against our own interests. We reach for what cuts us, spend our desire on what we can never have, destroy what we desperately need. Meanwhile, some of us—Bidart’s favorite heroic and tragic figures, such as Mozart, Maria Callas, Édith Piaf, and Marilyn Monroe—create art, because, as Bidart says in his Pulitzer-nominated chapbook Music Like Dirt, “we are creatures who need to make.” The creation of art, in Bidart’s view, is the only means we have of transcending our circumstances, even temporarily. Bidart—a friend and disciple in the 1970s of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and then lifelong torch-carrier for their legacies, began with extended dramatic monologues, including his two most famous poems, “Herbert White” and “Ellen West,” unprecedentedly sympathetic studies from the inside of deranged consciousnesses (“‘When I hit her on the head, it was good,// and then I did it to her a couple of times,—/ but it was funny,—afterwards,/ it was as if somebody else did it’”). Alongside these, he wrote subtle confessional poems examining his own identity as a small-town California native transplanted to the high-culture world of the East Coast. In the 1980s and ’90s, his poems—from the The Sacrifice, The Book of the Body, and Desire—were about human physicality and frailty, sex, sexuality, and its disappointments and dangers, as well as mortality: “Whatever lies still uncarried from the abyss within/ me as I die dies with me,” writes Bidart in “Home Faber,” a two-line poem. Desire also continues Bidart’s ongoing series of Hours of the Night poems, miasmic long narrative pieces, like the insomniac stirrings of an endlessly restless, culture-obsessed mind bent toward the past and “Grief for the unloved life, grief/ which, in middle age or old age, as goad// or shroud, comes to all.” Then come the short lyrics of recent books, which attempt to reckon with, among other things, a queer identity repressed and sublimated throughout an entire life: “Lie to yourself about this and you will/ forever lie about everything.” Closing the book is a new collection of poems obsessed with elegy, memory, and still-persistent desire in old age; Bidart remains as good as ever. He concludes with the fourth (of a proposed 12) Hour of the Night, which he calls the “hour from which I cannot wake.” As a poet, Bidart is one of my central models. Relentless and ever willing to face his demons, no matter how terrifying, in the interest of making great art, Bidart is, to my ear, one of the very few major living poets who never wavers, never repeats himself (though he has always orbited the same concerns), and extends his questing and questioning through each new work. This collected poems is an almost overwhelming bounty, a permanent book. (Aug.) Craig Morgan Teicher is a poet and critic; the editor of Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz; and PW’s director of digital operations.
WINNER OF THE 2018 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY
WINNER OF THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
"[Half-light] comprises fifty years' worth of daring, revelatory poems. For me, it's the book not just of the year but of the decade." —Garth Greenwell, Bookforum
"[Frank Bidart's] poetry over five decades has volubly modeled a wholly new approach to autobiographical material, chiefly by giving voice to the inner travails of other people's lives, both real and imagined . . . The publication of Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 gives readers a chance to see how Bidart, ill content merely to 'say what happened' in prefab stanzas, performs a poetry of 'embodiment' . . . Throughout his career, Bidart's self-devoting genius has been his ability to transform a poem into a vocalized (albeit anguished) performance of consciousness and moral interrogation, an occasion for metaphysical speculation as intense and oracular as any Shakespearean monologue or philosophical treatise . . . Sublime . . . Mesmerizing . . . ." —Major Jackson, The New York Times Book Review
"Made up of the seventy-eight-year-old author’s eight previous volumes of verse and a new sequence—the bold and elegiac Thirst—Half-light is both the culmination of a distinguished career and a poetic ur-text about how homophobia, doubt, and a parent’s confusing love can shape a gay child . . . The collection is a fraught song of the self, composed of subtleties and exclamations . . . True emotion demands a dialogue, and, like James Merrill’s extraordinary work The Changing Light at Sandover, Bidart’s poems are a kind of séance, one in which he tries to invoke and communicate love, even if that love can no longer be achieved, tasted, seen, touched." —Hilton Als, The New Yorker
"Frank Bidart has long challenged readers—and convention—with a complexity and originality not often seen in American poetry. Now with Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016, readers can gain a deeper understanding of how Bidart’s writing works together to create a vast, manifold narrative . . . The book closes with an ambitious section of new writing that deals with mortality and remembered friendships, a fitting way to end this monumental work." —Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
"Stunning . . . Outstanding." —Gregg Shapiro, The Bay Area Reporter
"A massive book that covers 50 years of words, Bidart’s collected contains enough routes and themes to produce years of reading. His style—capitalized words, italics, shifting speakers, personae, autobiography—result in a modern mythmaker who channels the old masters. A poet finely attuned to the contours of sensuality, he can simultaneously be spare and weighty." —Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
"Frank Bidart's Collected Poems is a true monument—not only the sum of fifty years as one of America’s leading poets, but also the release of a new collection (an event in itself) titled Thirst. Bidart is likely best known for the characters he puts into his poems . . . and the Collected is an opportunity to view these monologues all in conversation. It is also a chance to take stock of his innovations in poetic form—how they have developed throughout his career and how they have influenced the literary world. This is a big, big book—well over 700 pages—one to take one’s time with and to savor." —Scott Esposito, Lit Hub
"Half-light is a tremendous literary event. One of the undisputed master poets of our time, Frank Bidart eats and breathes the high culture of the twentieth century, from the music of Callas and Edith Piaf to the monuments of classic cinema. But Bidart is no mere aesthete; for him, art is a supreme life force, water in the desert of the soul, a talisman against oblivion.’ —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR.org
"Relentless and ever willing to face his demons, no matter how terrifying, in the interest of making great art, Bidart is, to my ear, one of the very few major living poets who never wavers, never repeats himself (though he has always orbited the same concerns), and extends his questing and questioning through each new work. This collected poems is an almost overwhelming bounty, a permanent book." —Publishers Weekly
"Art of first order . . . Truly remarkable." —Piotr Florczyk, New Orleans Review