Review by 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.
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Review by 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.)
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Review by 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.
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