| Edition |
First edition. |
| Descript |
718 pages ; 24 cm |
| Note |
Nonfiction. |
| Bibliog. |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 671-679) and index. |
| Contents |
Western night : poems 1965-90. In the western night : 1990 -- Sacrifice : 1983 -- Book of the body : 1977 -- Golden state : 1973 -- First hour of the night : 1990 -- Desire (1997) -- Star dust (2005). Music like dirt -- Watching the spring festival (2008) -- Metaphysical dog (2013). Hunger for the absolute -- History is a series of failed revelations -- Thirst (new poems, 2016) -- Interviews [with]. Mark Halliday -- Adam Travis -- Shara Lessley. |
| Summary |
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 zCreature coterminous with thirst,y still longing, still searching in himself, one of the zqueers of the universe.y Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, Bidart’s Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2017 are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line. |
| Subject |
American poetry -- 20th century.
|
|
American poetry -- 21st century.
|
| Genre |
Poetry.
|
| Unif Title |
Works
|
| ISBN/ISSN |
0374125953 |
|
9780374125950 |
|
