Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
I hate and--love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified.--from "Catullus: Excrucior" In Frank Bidart's collection of poems, the encounter with desire is the encounter with destiny. The first half contains some of Bidart's most luminous and intimate work-poems about the art of writing, Eros, and the desolations and mirror of history (in a spectacular narrative based on Tacitus). The second half of the book exts the overt lyricism of the opening section into even more ambitious territory-"The Second Hour of the Night" may be Bidart's most profound and complex meditation on the illusion of will, his most seductive dramatic poem to date.
Desire is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
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The source for "The Second Hour of the Night" is Ovid's story of Myrrha and her father Cinyras, one of the least-known but most suggestive tales--a reversal of the Oedipus myth. Bidart's tormented dramatization of Ovid's version reads like an investigation into the deepest layers of the story. While both poets turn the doomed heroine into a plant, Bidart looks into causes and motivation in a way that Ovid does not.
The short poems in the first section of Desire are also very strong. The poet, torn apart by the death of his lover, gives you a sense of the distance he has traveled over the past 15 years when he retranslates the two-line poem "Catullus: Excrucior," which he brilliantly adapted in The Sacrifice.
Version in The Sacrifice:
I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who evenVersion in Desire:
wants the fly while writhing.
I hate and--love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nailsBidart's acute perception of complicity allows him to do away with the idea of the victim. This is a formidable achievement, and his work is worthy of the scrutiny it demands.
itself, hanging crucified.
Frank Bidart's poems are collected in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990). In 1998 he won the Bobbitt Prize and received a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He teaches at Wellesley College.
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