Metaphysical Dog: Poems
Bidart (Watching the Spring Festival, 2008), winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, among many other awards, takes what is for him a radically personal approach in this candid and inquiring collection. A poet of refined distillation, Bidart writes with rare cogency and poignancy of “the war between the mind and the body,” ecstasy and obliteration, his mother’s death, and his coming out. In reflections on the mysteries of being, Bidart uses the words “crave,” “flesh,” “stone,” “soul,” “idea,” and “dream” in a beautifully plangent philosophical calculus of longing. A master of the ready counterpoint of the couplet, Bidart can be tart and bemusing, as in the title poem with its dark twist, as well as richly emotive in his yearning for metaphysical clarity. As he explains in his notes, poems are “curses, exorcism, prayer . . . the attempt to make someone or something live again.” His, he declares, is an “aesthetics of embodiment.” There is a quiet, stirring grandeur here as Bidart contemplates the spectrum of existence, life’s endless transformations, and our “hunger for the absolute.” --Donna Seaman