Metaphysical Dog: Poems - Softcover

Frank Bidart

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374534624 ISBN 13: 9780374534622

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

Synopsis

In Those Nights, Frank Bidart writes: We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not. Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet's most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours. Near the end of the book, Bidart writes: In adolescence, you thought your work ancient work: to decipher at last human beings' relation to God. Decipher love. To make what was once whole whole again: or to see why it never should have been thought whole. This ancient work reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the hunger for the Absolute-a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled History is a series of failed revelations. The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.

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Review:

Praise for Metaphysical Dog The best book of poems published this year? Easy--it was Frank Bidart's Metaphysical Dog, Bidart's strongest book ever, and also his most accessible: for readers who are new to Bidart's work, this is the best place to start. --Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker Bidart's new book returns to the rough, terse and sometimes shocking phrasings that won him attention decades ago. He uses them, now, to look back, to ask how memory works, what poetry does, and what either of them can do for souls, and bodies, past the midpoint of a life . . . The forceful starkness in Bidart's usual style--almost no description, few overt euphonies, plenty of repetition--fits characters who try to test, or reject, or escape, the limits of the merely physical, describable world . . . To immerse oneself in Bidart's work is to enter a crowd of scary, unusual characters: artistic geniuses, violent misfits, stunted failures and dramatic self-accusers (including, in some guise, the poet himself). Yet it is also to discover credible claims about the lives that many of us choose . . . These poems do not lay out a path to happiness, but they do provide a theory of art . . . Bidart writes through passion, but also through subtraction, leaving out all but the statements that seem essential to the soul, the desire, the wisdom or the memory at hand. The results, however austere, can be revelations: his poems are doors best opened with cautious attention--behind them you might even see yourself. --Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review Poet Frank Bidart's Metaphysical Dog is a champion. Vanity Fair No major poet of our time has been so unguarded as Bidart, so willing to travel to the dark places in the psyche, so recklessly earnest about his need to get to the bottom of things . . . Bidart's brave, virulent investment in resistance results in work of extraordinary power . . . [his] work is at once challenging and intimate. It court --Various

About the Author:

Frank Bidart's most recent full-length collections of poetry are 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, and, most recently, the 2007 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0374534624
• ISBN 13: 9780374534622
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128