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In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990

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In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990

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Overview

In the Western Night brings together in one volume all of the poems to date, including many previously unpublished poems, of one of the most exciting and gifted poets writing today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374522711
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	06/01/1991
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Frank Bidart's collections of poetry include 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 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.

	In the Western Night (1990)
	To the Dead	3
	Dark Night	5
	In the Western Night	7
	Poem in the Stanza of the "Rubaiyat"	12
	In the Ruins	13
	Guilty of Dust	14
	The Sacrifice (1983)
	The War of Vaslav Nijinsky	21
	For Mary Ann Youngren	50
	Catullus: Odi et amo	52
	Confessional	53
	The Sacrifice	75
	Genesis 1-2:4	77
	The Book of the Body (1977)
	The Arc	85
	Happy Birthday	94
	Elegy	96
	The Book of the Body	106
	Ellen West	109
	Golden State (1973)
Part 1
	Herbert White	127
	Self-Portrait, 1969	132
Part 2
	California Plush	135
	Book of Life	144
	Golden State	149
Part 3
	Vergil Aeneid 1.1-33	167
	After Catullus	169
	To My Father	170
	Another Life	171
	The First Hour of the Night (1990)
	Now In Your Hand	177
	You remain	179
	By These Waters	180
	Long and Short Lines	181
	Book of Night	182
	The First Hour of the Night	183
	Appendix
	An Interview--With Mark Halliday	223
	Notes	243

From the B&N Reads Blog

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Editorial Reviews

In the Western Night" establishes Frank Bidart's place among this century's most emotionally articular poets. His fine earlier books, published between 1973 and 1983, are here, surroudned by a selection of equally impressive newer pieces. Taken together, they constitute a hauntingly raw voice that finds itself through an exhilarating array of prosodic techniques. More than most of his post-confessional contemporaries, Bidart is unafraid of passion, and willing to harness his passion to words and structures...His voice, and the voices in his dramatic monologues, are unrelentingly curious and honest; and yet they inevitably back up against the greatest of mysteries.” —Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe

“In the supreme poems, Bidart's spiritual force makes me...yield to the authority of the voice. "Ellen West" is a heartbreaking act of sympathy.” —Denis Donoghue, The New Republic

“Achieves a grandeur of vision few poets nowadays can match.” —Alan Shapiro, Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

In resourcefully inventive poems, Bidart confronts head-on the insoluble problems of being: the thirst for meaning, the fathomless abyss of death, the polarities of good and evil. Dramatic monologues wrest feverish, luminous meditations out of an anorectic, hospitalized poet (``Ellen West''), a sociopathic rapist/killer (``Herbert White'') and a creative artist grappling with guilt, insanity, Nietzsche and the search for an authentic self (``The War of Vaslav Nijinsky''). Bidart also draws on wrenching autobiographical incident, Christian tradition, Western philosophy. ``Golden State'' evokes the anger, love and confusion occasioned by the death of his alcoholic father. A poet who believes the poem embodies ``the mind in action,'' he synthesizes the flexibility of Pound's Cantos , Robert Lowell's sense of argument with the past, and Hart Crane's collage-like structuring into a distinctive, sharp-edged voice raised to an intense pitch. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

These intense, often disturbing poems are not for the faint-hearted. To read them is to be both discomforted and fascinated by Bidart's subject matter: the lives of a bulimic and an amputee, Nijinsky's insanity, the loss of friends and lovers, and the poet's own childhood, blighted by parental alcoholism and neglect. Bidart employs a strong narrative voice and a liberal use of typographic conceits (italics, ellipses, capitalized words, idiosyncratic punctuation), which adds a distinctive polyphonic texture to the poems. These are dramatic monologs for the late 20th century, full of anger, pain, and cynicism. As the poet writes, ``I hate and love. Ignorant fish/who even wants the fly while writhing.'' It is the tension between bipolarities of emotion that give these poems their forceful energy. Recommended for collections of contemporary poetry.-- Christine Stenstrom, New York Law Sch. Lib.

Library Journal

In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990

In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990

Paperback

Paperback

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Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

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Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

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Customer Reviews