Star Dust: Poems

I have very little doubt that Frank Bidart is a major American poet. What do I mean by that? I mean that he has brought into American poetry something altogether new - a voice that attempts to explore the large questions about the human condition using the ages old form of dramatic monologue in a completely new way. To date, there are several such long "Bidart" poems: "Herbert White", "Ellen West", "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky", "The Second Hour of the Night" and now, in this new collection, "The Third Hour of the Night". The ambition of this life-long project is enormous. The fact that his craft continues to live up to this ambition is what makes Bidart a very special author at work today. In book after book after book he has given us long, intense, self-contained poems that explore essential components of human condition--from our desire to our desire to make--with seriousness and unmistakable genius. Genius is not a word I hesitate to use when I write about Frank Bidart's life-long work. This is the poet who has more in common with Dostoevsky than with any of our contemporaries. Bidart disdains the issues (such as critical theory or Irony, with a capital "I", for instance) that obsess poets today. Instead, he asks essential questions about what it is to live in our time; he struggles with large, unembarrassed emotions and original, serious ideas, blending them together with force and spark. This new collection, "Stardust," is particularly interesting for its extended meditation on our wish to be challenged by our actions, our need to produce something meaningful from our time on this planet ("my father's ring was B with a dart / through it, in diamonds against polished black stone. // I have it. What parents leave you / is their lives. Until my mother died she struggled to make / a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me. / Many creatures must / make, but only one must seek / within itself what to make."). This exploration of creativity culminates in "The Third Hour of the Night" where Bidart spins the story of the Italian sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, asking moral questions in a dramatic narrative rich with murder and desire to make something beautiful, lasting enough to contain human spirit. As unpredictable as the process of making itself, the poem begins in Western notions of (and struggle with) morality, and blends into an African element of magic where violence and beauty are one ("In this universe anybody can kill anybody / with a stick. What gods gave me / is their gift, the power to bury within each / creature the hour it ceases. / Everyone knows I have powers but not such power. / If they knew I would be so famous / they would kill me. / I tell you because your tongue is stone. / If the gods ever give you words, one night in / sleep you will wake to find me above you.) Here, Bidart does not just expand on Stevens' dictum that "death is a mother of beauty" - he makes of it a human necessity in a beautifully written and high

These poems are yet another extension of Bidart's talent and extraordinary ability to paint a picture for us through words - his choice AND placement of them!

The poems in Frank Bidart's STAR DUST are a world unto themselves. They provide all the nourishment one needs from literature by exploring what is most deeply definitive about our humanity: our ability to love and to fail at love and our ability to create. The final poem of the book, the long "Third Hour of the Night" about the Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, reads like a nineteenth century European novel : its narrative fairly gallops. And like Dostoevsky, Bidart unflinchingly forces us to face the most difficult and urgent moral questions. Like his shaman in the final poem, Bidart dares to extract the heart of his subjects in order to examine it and then put it back. With Bidart as our guide we can travel through the underworld of his dark world vision and emerge edified and strengthened, if not entirely cleansed.

Frank Bidart is a master of passionate language, on the order of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. Star Dust is one of his pivotal books. Start with the short poems teasing out the ambivalences and consolations of loneliness, regret, desire, fury, and creativity. End with the difficult masterpiece, "The Third Hour of the Night." As our public existence seems to drift inexorably downwards, it is a wonderful revelation that such a poet lives among us. Reading these poems one feels alternately shattered and uplifted.

Frank Bidart's STAR DUST is something like a perfect book of poems. It has a beginning, middle and end and never stops being a good--which is to say gripping, even suspenseful-- read . The opening section of poems, a sequence called "Music Like Dirt," works like a prologue to a collection of poems about making, about the project of being-in-the world through the lens of the maker. The final long poem, "The Third Hour of the Night," about the sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, is both a culmination of this meditiation and a subversion of the ideas put forth in the earlier poems. This is an unsettling, brilliant, beautifully made and deeply moving book of poems. And unlike many contemporary books of poems, it is direct, accessible and deeply interesting (the way novels are interesting) from start to finish. Yet it repays re-reading and study for its formal virtuosity and variety.