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Summary
Summary
An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and "one of the undisputed master poets of our time" (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR)
Words, voices reek of the worlds from which they
emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable
aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise.
Words--there is a gap, nonetheless always
and forever, between words and the world--
slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish.
*
Set up a situation,--
. . . then reveal an abyss.
For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence , the Pulitzer Prize winner's eleventh collection of poetry, Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and old cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls reality forth--with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
"We were born into an amazing experiment," opens a poem early in Bidart's striking eighth collection, his first since winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. The poem promptly revises that statement: "At least we thought we were." If Bidart is famous for his soliloquies and the essayistic quality of his lyric long poems, his new collection amplifies the undercurrent of uncertainty that has always supported those forms: "Dreaming, I dreamt the basket I held held/ words." His shimmering language is on display across the philosophical, autobiographical, and devotional styles these poems adopt, employing his signature play with capitalization and quotations. In "Hour of the Night," he writes: "The terrible law of desire is that what quickens desire is what is DIFFERENT." There and across the collection, Bidart intermittently turns to his family's complicity in racism with mixed results, but always with pathos as it explores formative childhood scenes. As the collection ends, Bidart returns to questions of mortality, finding in the present moment a mixing of times and of states of being: "Tonight, I abjure the wisdom, the illusion of/ forgetting." This collection is another memorable contribution to Bidart's oeuvre. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Pulitzer Prize--winning poet Bidart (Metaphysical Dog, 2013) returns with his twelfth book of poetry, and at 82, he's still got it. Readers familiar with Bidart's work will recognize his signature typographical touches ("America // is a great IDEA: the reality leaves something to be desired") and pithy interjections ("All over the earth, / elegies for the earth"). Here quick insights expand into reflections on recent racial and political unrest in the U.S. and are often bent inwards through repetition: "When a master stares at himself in the future // what he fears is that the world will do to him what // he did to the world when he was the world." Many moments like this will cause readers to pause and consider Bidart's linguistic sleight of hand. Similarly, Bidart's breathtaking descriptions of the most mundane landscapes never fail to captivate: "Phantasmagoric enormous // tumbleweeds in the empty / landscape rolled aimlessly outside the speeding car." Another entry in the author's accomplished oeuvre, another fresh take on the current state of this country, one informed by a lifetime of poetic invention.
Library Journal Review
Bidart, whose multiple awards include a Pulitzer, tops off five decades of writing with a book arguing Against Silence in its embrace of the world.
Table of Contents
| Part 1 Why the Dead Cannot Answer | p. 3 |
| At the Shore | p. 4 |
| Mourning What We Thought We Were | p. 7 |
| Words Reek Worlds | p. 10 |
| The Moral Arc of the Universe Bends Toward Justice | p. 17 |
| Behind the Lion | p. 19 |
| The Fifth Hour of the Night | p. 22 |
| Part 2 The Ghost | p. 39 |
| Poem with a Refrain from LeRoy Chatfield | p. 41 |
| The Great, the One Subject | p. 43 |
| Poem Beginning With Words by Lisel Mueller | p. 49 |
| Dialogue With Flesh | p. 53 |
| Coda | p. 55 |
| On My Seventy-Eighth | p. 59 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 63 |