A review by ryancahill
Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart

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”.