Desire

by Frank Bidart

Poems contemplate the art of writing, Eros, the desolations of history, and the illusion of will

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Literature

61 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Frank Bidart is the author of Metaphysical Dog (FSG, 2013), Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2008), Star Dust (FSG, 2005), Desire (FSG, 1997), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990). He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the 2007 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Joanne van der Vlies · Rating 4 out of 5]

• "I hate and -- love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified."

• "There is a king inside the king that the king does not acknowledge.
Four steps forward then one back, then three back, then four forward: the illusion of movement without movement, because you know that what you move towards, (malignant in the eyes of God's and men) isn't there, doesn't exist."

[Gus · Rating 5 out of 5]

He is the best at channeling the voices of the dead. For example:

Lady Bird

Neither an invalid aunt who had been asked to care for a sister's/ little girl, to fill the dead sister's place, nor the child herself// did, could: not in my Daddy's eyes--nor/ should they;// so when we followed that golden couple into the White House// I was aware that people look at/ the living, and wish for the dead.

[C. Varn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bidart's explorations of desire in terms of contemporary love contrasting with ancient myth interlacing work based on Tacitus and Illiad, particularly in the second section, the massive 33-page poem entitled The Second Hour of the Night based on the myth of Myrrha. Bidart's sparse writing really works in the first section despite how heavily allusive and somewhat ironic they can be.

[justin]

i ll give it another shot some time soon. finished it and felt a little underwhelmed

[Andy Oram · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing collection split between modern love and ancient lore. About half of the poems circle around love and the loss of the beloved. Less interesting to me were the poems focusing on ancient wars and myths, although the myth covered in the extensive Second Hour of the Night reaches heights of evocative sadness. I picked up this book because I found the style edgy and experimental, and it succeeded in stimulating my sensitivity to unorthodox ways of expression.

[Catherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5
WE FILL THE FORMS AND WHEN WE FILL THEM WE CHANGE THEM AND ARE CHANGED.

Nothing like reading "The Second Hour of the Night" out loud in workshop for 90 minutes. For the second time.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each of them knows what will happen here:–

. . . she can delay, he can delay
because what is sweet about
deferral is that what arrives

despite it, is revealed as inevitable:–

[Ellise · Rating 4 out of 5]

It left me with a certain vagueness

[Celine Dion]

Not a fan at all!

[jess]

wow.

[Sunny Butterfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best book of all time

[Josh Miley]

"not free not to choose"

[Scarlett Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Its beauty is hard to look at ('as the eye to the sun'); lifting the scab over sex and death ('when we wake to desire'). I will read and read again.

[Brian Wasserman · Rating 3 out of 5]

i cant stand the form, otherwise i would give this book more of a chance

[Fungus Gnat · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Bidart’s 5th book of poems, counting as 4th a “collected” summation. The book is divided into two parts, the first a series of 13 pieces ranging from less than half a page to five pages in length, the second consisting of a single 33-page poem entitled “The Second Hour of the Night.”

This is the first of Bidart’s books I’ve read, which is one more than I have read of almost every other living poet, so that gives you some idea how little attention you should pay to what I have to say.

I can’t say that the first half of the book did that much for me. A few of the pieces – “Adolescence,” “Lady Bird” – struck me favorably, but I wasn’t sure what to make of the two lines of “Catullus: Excrucior.” Or, for that matter, of “The Return.” The latter is apparently a retelling from Tacitus, but determining what is Bidart and what is Tacitus would require consulting the source, which is not readily available enough to me to make it worth attempting.

For me, the most interesting piece in the first part of the book was a brief essay—two pages of one-sentence paragraphs entitled “Borges and I.” This is about a work of that title by Borges himself, in which he attempts to distinguish between his living self and his making self. Bidart’s reflection contains his reactions to that distinction. It is complex but more-or-less intelligible, droll but serious.

“The Second Hour of the Night” is quite a bit different from what precedes it and, in my opinion, worth more attention. It is in three parts. The first, of perhaps half a dozen pages, is built around a lengthy quotation from Berlioz’s autobiography in which he grieves over the death of his former wife (or lover?), whose once-promising life wound up filled with sorrow. The great majority of the poem consists of a retelling of the myth of Myrrha, a young woman attracted to her father who repetitively, under disguise of dark, sleeps with him – with all the dark sequelae one might expect in an ancient myth. The concluding section is brief and ambiguous, but it sounds good. Among the topics considered in this rich poem is the power and ineluctability of desire. I found it fascinating and haunting.

[Sienna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary meditation on... well, desire. Love, lust, longing, the complications that accompany that which we cannot control or change. Love of love as much as love of the beloved. The desire to want something else, to be someone else. After reading the first half of the book, I described Bidart's work to a friend as sparse and powerful. He uses the spaces between words, the ideas connecting and inhabiting them, deftly, building and repeating in an almost musical way.

"The Return," a poem about war and populated with dead soldiers unsaveable for centuries, affected me deeply. I keep returning to these terrible, beautiful lines:

Fragments of spears and horses' limbs lay
intertwined, while human

skulls were nailed

like insults to the tree-trunks.

And then I read the second half in one long, gasping gulp. With a single poem Bidart turns the concept of desire back on itself and makes the story of Myrrha's betrayed, bewildered love painfully vivid. He makes it true. I won't feed you a tantalizing snippet, however tempting it is to share this piece, because it must be read in full. Hie thee to your library or local bookshop and let Frank Bidart devour your heart.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

The concept I see Bidart describing in this book is difficult to articulate, which is one the things that pulls me into the book. In some way, Bidart wants to show how desire can actually begin to feel like a concrete object, or a body, that is independent of our physical bodies. And this desire takes on a life, poses demands, and compels us to people or ideas we wouldn't normally consider. The central poem of the book, "The Second Hour of the Night" tells the myth of Myrrha, and her adolescent desire to be sexually intimate with her father. This desire may be irrational, but the way Bidart describes it, it is understandable. And, perhaps, that unlikely combination of irrationality and understandability just starts the conversation underlying the poems in this book.

[Rui Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is mostly amazing for the poem, "The Second Hour of the Night" which is 33 pages of sheer brilliance. In the first 21 pages, there is a poem, "The Return" that foreshadows the level of aesthetic quality that approaches in the latter half of the book, but the poem "Borges and I" is a silly imitation of the Argentinian master. The two "halves" of the book are so dissimilar that only the usage of "pre-existing forms" that are liberally scattered throughout allows for a coherence between the former and the latter. It would be incredible if Bidart could create a book that keeps the same style throughout but commits to an epic scale, instead of writing something epic in quality for just a short run. I look forward to reading writing of this quality from him.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bidart's work does sometimes require some code-breaking, which may account for some people's ho-hum reaction. You often have to work to be wowed. But the work can pay off. The longer poems in particular have a density more commonly found in prose, but their lyricism is so weirdly effectively that you sometimes understand without understanding how.

That said, I found Desire to be less ecstatic and more labored than his more recent collection, Stardust. I would send skeptics in that direction.

[Queer · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is so much here that I normally abhor about poetry and while not my taste, this work succeeds in almost every way. From the ruminations on myth, history and desire to the sleepless epitaphs, Bidart comments while revivifying the dead. The haunting end is fitting for desire: sometimes what we want is not what we get even if in some peculiar way it is both ourselves and something we have made. Read this because the lines cut deep.

[Christina M Rau · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was interesting and worth the wait. It was about all different kinds of desire in war, in lust, and I suppose love. It was poetic. It was mythological. It was a story not in prose but in something that played on the page. I read it in half an hour. It was short.

[Aaron Marsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Honestly, found it stunning. My new favorite poet. I flagged about half of the poems in here. What a wonderful change of pace to read a queer poet that is so innovative... and I've discovered it really helps my own writing. Excellent.

(A)

[Molly M M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish more people would read his stuff.

[Eliza T. Williamson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bidart created a gritty, touching and at times surprising collection of poems. It was a pleasure to see "fuck" used in a poem and have it work.

[Gerbik]

I was given this one back in college and have read it a few times - everything except "The Second Hour of the Night." I plan to read that long poem soon.

[Brent Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Frank Bidart is the best confessional poet in decades.

[James Ford · Rating 1 out of 5]

For intellectuals only.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

'the second hour of the night'... frank bidart rly went there

[Melissa]

dull. No desire

[Theelmo26 · Rating 4 out of 5]