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slimikin's review against another edition
2.0
Good poems and, I suspect, powerful ones, but not ones written for me. Though they did make me sad. ...And it's been a while since I've had to look up a word every few pages: where has "velleity" been all my life?!
maddykpdx's review against another edition
4.0
Slow-form mastery. So much fun to read aloud.
I like:
"one day, staring at the mountain
you ceased to ask
Open Sesame
merely requiring that narrative reveal
something structural about the world."
from DREAM OF THE BOOK
-and-
O RUIN O HAUNTED
I like:
"one day, staring at the mountain
you ceased to ask
Open Sesame
merely requiring that narrative reveal
something structural about the world."
from DREAM OF THE BOOK
-and-
O RUIN O HAUNTED
kell_xavi's review against another edition
4.0
3.5
This entire collection has a wonderful cadence and emotional rhythm that builds from historical events and intimate moments within them. Each poem took me further into the physic space of Bidart's imagining and recollecting, a sort of room marbled with the shifting of time and feeling.
Individual poems resonated less than the whole (that said, I loved "He is Ava Gardner," "Whitman," "Plea and Chastisement," "Presage," and the two below, all on their own), but lines came up like the ringing of bells: unexpected, light and joyous, weighted with the experiences of a whole life. I've been writing a story about family and queer intimacy recently (perhaps the main themes in Bidart's collection), and I found myself ruminating on lines like this many times, thinking that this one or that one would be wonderful as an epigraph, a ghost or on outline of the poem that says something all on its own.
We live by symbolic/ substitution. At the grave's lip, what is/ but is not is what// returns you to what is not. (from "Like")
...what must be/ obliterated in you is the twisted// obverse of what underlies everything. (from "History")
As long as you are alive/ she is alive// You are the leaping/ dog// capricious on the grass, lunging/ at something only it can see. (from "Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall")
I'd like to read more, to sink into and find inspiration again from the living of a gay poet through the melancholy of history and into fragile, breakable nexts. Here are two poems from this collection that work astonishingly well:
"For the AIDS Dead" - https://newrepublic.com/article/100028/the-aids-dead
"Queer" - https://poets.org/poem/queer
This entire collection has a wonderful cadence and emotional rhythm that builds from historical events and intimate moments within them. Each poem took me further into the physic space of Bidart's imagining and recollecting, a sort of room marbled with the shifting of time and feeling.
Individual poems resonated less than the whole (that said, I loved "He is Ava Gardner," "Whitman," "Plea and Chastisement," "Presage," and the two below, all on their own), but lines came up like the ringing of bells: unexpected, light and joyous, weighted with the experiences of a whole life. I've been writing a story about family and queer intimacy recently (perhaps the main themes in Bidart's collection), and I found myself ruminating on lines like this many times, thinking that this one or that one would be wonderful as an epigraph, a ghost or on outline of the poem that says something all on its own.
We live by symbolic/ substitution. At the grave's lip, what is/ but is not is what// returns you to what is not. (from "Like")
...what must be/ obliterated in you is the twisted// obverse of what underlies everything. (from "History")
As long as you are alive/ she is alive// You are the leaping/ dog// capricious on the grass, lunging/ at something only it can see. (from "Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall")
I'd like to read more, to sink into and find inspiration again from the living of a gay poet through the melancholy of history and into fragile, breakable nexts. Here are two poems from this collection that work astonishingly well:
"For the AIDS Dead" - https://newrepublic.com/article/100028/the-aids-dead
"Queer" - https://poets.org/poem/queer
ryancahill's review against another edition
After reading so much fiction, coming back to poetry is challenging — I forget how slowly and with what care I have to read. The poems in this collection are beautiful and spare, with a ‘metaphysical’ bend as the title suggests. But also in the title is the simple and concrete ‘dog’ to which Bidart seems equally wed, as most of these poems oscillate between the philosophical and the sensual, many of them following patterns of alternating 2-line and 1-line stanzas. This allows Bidart’s thoughts — conveyed with elegant but often complicated syntax — to unfold in natural rhythmic steps. There were lines that struck me for their immediacy and truth: “When what we understand about / what we are / changes, whole / parts of us fall mute.” There were lines that were slower to arrive, that I had to read multiple times to parse out: “To carve the body of the world / and out of flesh make flesh / obdurate as stone. Looking down into the casket-crib / of your love, embittered by / soul you crave to become stone.” I appreciated both. Many of these poems, in the poet’s old age, deal with finality and the absolute, but ultimately they all in some way or another return to what seems to be Bidart’s principal subject: the “ordinary divided unsimple heart”.
moosegurl's review
3.0
"the woman who found that she
to her bewilderment and horror
had a body"
"You cannot tell if
addictions, secret, narcotic,
damage or enlarge
mind, through which you seize the world."
to her bewilderment and horror
had a body"
"You cannot tell if
addictions, secret, narcotic,
damage or enlarge
mind, through which you seize the world."
nick_jenkins's review
5.0
Bidart carries intensity and spaciousness within his poems better than any other poet I've read. Partly this has to do with the way his poems look on the page, but there is something even back of the poems which mixes these two qualities in some taut ratio that seems to me enigmatic, even magical.
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