Review
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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 phobia, 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
ity, 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 rtunity 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
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About the Author
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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 in American
Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at
Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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