Metaphysical Dog

by Frank Bidart

A vital, searching new collection from one of finest American poets at work today

In “Those Nights,” Frank Bidart writes: “We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not.” Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet’s most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours.
     Near the end of the book, Bidart writes:

     In adolescence, you thought your work
     ancient work: to decipher at last

      human beings’ relation to God. Decipher

     love. To make what was once whole
     whole again: or to see

     why it never should have been thought whole.

     This “ancient work” reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the “hunger for the Absolute”—a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled “History is a series of failed revelations.”
     The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Poetry Books of 2013

A New York Times Notable Book of 2013

An NPR Best Book of 2013

Genres: Poetry, Queer, LGBT, Fiction, Contemporary, Gay, Queer Studies

113 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2013

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

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The door through which you were shoved out
into the light
was self-loathing and terror.’

Careening through time and space, having pushed onto the stage of life without any of our own consent, we find ourselves hungering for meaning, hungering for an Absolute. Through the most difficult of times we discover the food for our souls that can best nourish us, yet discover that our bodies, our flesh, is set on an irreversible path towards rot and ruin. Frank Bidart’s confessional collection, ‘Metaphysical Dog’, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, exquisitely explores this hunger for an Absolute, chronicling his life’s pursuit towards understanding while unafraid to document both his failures and fears as he nears his own death. This is a highly psychological collection that—hrough Bidart’s expansively expressive style that is bravely confessional of his own fears of death, the death of his parents, and his own coming out—pushes the reader into the dark recesses of their own mind, towards ‘the eerie acceptance of finitue’, yet always reminding us that despite our destined ruin, we are a creative body ‘through which you seize the world,’ and discover the infinite through the ideas and emotions that pour from the caverns of our heart with a searing light.

As You Crave Soul
but find flesh
till flesh

almost seems sufficient

when the as-yet-unwritten
poem within you

demands existence

all you can offer it are words. Words
are flesh. Words

are flesh

craving to become idea, idea
dreaming it has found, this time, a body

obdurate as stone.

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.

You mourn not
what is not, but what never could have been.

What could not ever find a body

Because what you wanted, he
wanted but did not want.

Ordinary divided unsimple heart.

What you dream is that, by eating
the flesh of words, what you make

makes mind and body

one. When, after a reading, you are asked
to describe your aesthetics,

you reply, An aesthetics of embodiment

Bidart has a gift for casually caressing the dark fears within our mortal hearts, the fears of dying without ever becoming whole, the fears of a future in which we cannot participate in body, and the horror of watching our flesh wither and die. His style is reflective of life itself, each line spaced out—much like Wittgenstein’s most noted work—spending pages on a poem to allow each moment to be appreciated both in it’s singular beauty, but as a piece of the full evolution of the poem, much like how our individual memories are held dear as singular moments but it is the collective beauty of them all that form a life. Bidart uses full range of italics, all capital letters, bullet points, and other poetic punctuation to adorn his poetry. There is even a section of notes to help elucidate his poetry and give full credit to the many allusions found within. I was initially taken aback by this notes section, but upon further reflection it seems to be a friendly invite into his works and allows for several asides where he can frame the poems in personal or spiritual context that allows for greater enjoyment without feeling like he is holding the readers hand or annoyingly pointing out his own genius.

The true language of ecstasy
Is the forbidden’

‘At seventy-two, the future is what I mourn,’ writes an aging Bidart in ‘The Enterprise is Abandoned’, the title of which being one of the many lines that is repeated like a mantra throughout this collection. Metaphysical Dog is at its best when mulling over our inevitable demise because by reminding us that we must be ground out of existence like the butt of a cigarette, we see how luminescent and glorious our expiring lives truly are and must mourn a future where we cannot exist (at least not in body, but, as Bidart hints, our words and actions remembered in those closest to us are a glimmer of immortality).’Because earth’s inmates travel in flesh,’ Bidart begins his poem ‘Elegy for Earth’, ‘and hide from flesh/and adore flesh/you hunger for flesh that does not die.’ We seek an Absolute, something we can never be, to eternalize our mortal flesh. ‘You’re deathbound,’ he reminds us, we have an expiration date in ‘this journey through flesh/not just in flesh or with flesh/but through it.’ Through flesh, through the mortal and finite and towards a finite. It is such an illustrious and gratifying idea, and it is ideas that travel through space forever, continuing on long after we are dust and memory along with the other decayed flesh that we lusted and loved as we speeded along towards the closed point of our timeline.

’Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything

so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.

But lie to yourself, what you will

lose is yourself. Then you
Turn into them.

Bidart ties together the past and present to illuminate a lifetime spent through flesh, using both his personal history as well as film to exemplify his ideas. It is the confessional poetry that really shines in the collection, which he bravely puts forth in poems such as ‘Queer’ which documents his coming out in a unkind world where even his parents would look down upon him. ‘If I had managed to come out to my/mother, she would have blamed not/me, but herself.’ There are passionate memories of young love:

When I met him, I knew I had

Weaned myself from God, not
hunger for the absolute. O unquenched

mouth, tounging what is and must
remain inapprehensible –

saying You are not finite. You are not finite

This passage really rocks my heart with it’s emotional might; begging and pleading with a god or existence to allow such a moment not be a mere fleeting blip of passing power but an eternal line carving it’s valor as a glowing arc across all of existence and eternity, despite knowing that one may be damned for it. This sort of potency is what words were made for.

Film plays an important role in this collection as well, as Bidart reflects on actors and actresses now gone from both his earlier days and from the modern era. Even Heath Ledger gets a nod, ‘his glee that whatever long ago mutilated his/mouth, he has mastered to mutilate/you’, summing up the poem with a quote from the actor himself (presented here without the poetic spacing and extra line spacing just to keep this review from stretching towards the stratosphere): ‘Once I have the voice/that’s/the line/and at/the end/of the line/is a hook/and attached/to that/ is the soul.’ Bidart uses the Hollywood themes for a duel purpose, exposed in one of the final poems ‘On This Earth Where No Secure Foothold Is’ (another often repeated line. The repetition of lines and words give a powerful, unifying force to this collection that would defy the already butchering effect of a ‘Selected Works’ and amplifies the joy that comes from reading this book in one sitting), where he shows life as having to sell yourself to others, like headshots to Hollywood, and ties the immensity of his work together in one concise poem about identity in a world fueled by consumerism (included at the end of this review).

‘The subject of this poem
is how much the spaces that you now move in
cost….
They cost your life’

In order to grasp beauty, we must live our a mortal life, a life that will be taken away and, as it is ripped from beneath us, shown in all it’s glory. It is poetry that most grasps my heart than any other art form, poetry that moves me more than anything, poetry that reminds me that any sorrow, strife or solitude I suffer is a worthwhile sacrifice for the beauty of words and escaping existence. Frank Bidart has compiled a wonderful collection here, one that didn’t really strike me at first, yet I was unable to put down for days. Each rereading exposed a new perfect sentence, and made me realize his thoughts and musings had been lurking around my brain, making me question my own life and my own mortality even while the book was tightly shut at home. Brave and forthright in his confessional poetry about his life and loves, and cutting as well as wise in his statements of death and our hunger for an Absolute, Bidart delivers an outstanding array of poems that are sure to stick deep in the heart. While they may be bleak at first glace, there is an uplifting power to them that pulls across all the ages of humanity to show us that though we are finite, our ideas can be infinite.
3.75/5

On This Earth Where No Secure Foothold Is
Wanting to be a movie star like Dean Stockwell or Gigi Perreau,
answering an ad at ten or eleven you made your mother drive you
to Hollywood and had expensive Hollywood pictures taken.
          •
Hollywood wasn’t buying.
          •
Everyone is buying but not everyone wants to buy you
          •
You See the kids watching, brooding.
          •
Religion, politics, love, work, sex—each enthrallment, each
enthusiasm presenting itself as pleasure or necessity, is
recruitment.
          •
Each kid is at the edge of a sea.
          •
At each kid’s feet multitudinous voices say I will buy you if you
buy me.
          •
Who do you want to be bought by?
          •
The child learns this is the question almost immediately.
          •
Mother?
          •
Father?
          •
Both mother and father tried to enlist you but soon you learned
That you couldn’t enlist on both at the same time.
          •
They lied that you could but they were at war and soon you
learned you couldn’t.
          •
How glamorous they were!
          •
As they aged they mourned that to buyers they had become
invisible.
          •
Both of them in the end saw beneath then only abyss.
          •
You are at the edge of a sea.
          •
You want to buy buy you know not everyone wants to buy you.
          •
Each enthrallment is recruitment.
          •
Your body will be added to the bodies that piled-up make the
structures of the world.
          •
Your body will be erased, swallowed.
          •
Who do you want to be swallowed by?
          •
It’s almost the same question as To be or not to be.
          •
Figuring out who they want to be bought by is what all the kids
with brooding looks on their face are brooding about.
          •
Your weapon is your mind.

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cheston Knapp (Managing editor of Tin House): I really hate it how some folks talk about poetry as though it were that flavor of jelly belly you carefully pick around, like buttered popcorn or jelly or, if they don’t have the gene (the Pleasure Gene), licorice. How they act like poetry is some course you can skip. As though it were not an entire fucking meal. So I’ve been dining out on some poetry. I am just finishing up Frank Bidart’s new book, Metaphysical Dog: Poems, which is like sitting down for a five-course Michelin-starred meal paired with wine; it’s left me feeling gut-struck and wrung out but giddily full. I want to take the menu home with me. Seriously, though, can’t recommend this book enough. Do your tummy a solid.

[sevdah]

Happy that Frank Bidart won the Pulitzer prize for poetry yesterday. A reason to revisit this collection of poems on being queer, questioning gender, being unrecognizable to yourself which makes you write incomprehensibly, having an eating disorder, coming out late or never coming out. The prime shit, in a manner of speaking.

[William Reichard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bidart has long been a favorite poet of mine, and I went into this collection with excitement and high expectations. What I found was a book with a fascinating premise - a series of poems that focus on the search for the absolute, the Platonic ideal, and the often disappointing realities one finds when searching for such perfection. Philosophically, this is a wonderful collection - one of Bidart's most searching books. But the poems themselves often disappoint. Bidart is so focused on his philosophical quest that he seems to overlook what's needed to make a strong, solid poem. The book also often feels very self-indulgent - Bidart obviously has some monumental issues with his late mother, and he works these issues out, repeatedly, in these poems. One could distill the nature of these mother poems down to "I hate you, Mommy! But I love you! And I am you!" Uneven work.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry makes me want to sound poetic, which is a disaster I won’t evade in this review. Every so often I chance upon a book that for a couple intense hours takes me somewhere else – I said to myself this morning after I pricked my way through Frank Bidart’s Metaphysical Dog. In the course of that intensity, my mind is outside of my body and body is outside of my skin, something akin to Houseman’s dangerous definition of poetry:

Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles and the razor ceases to act.

For me it’s a recursive excitability. The dog is manic and chasing its tale.

Still, it makes a memory. I imagine I could break my life into these out-of-body moments. On a wooden balcony, reading Cavafy for the first time as dusk fell on Chicago, or the Sunday morning in 1981 when I settled in the sun and read James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem, a book that could not stop celebrating the miracle of the moment.

Compared to Schuyler, Bidart’s book is an inverse epiphany.

That history is a series of failed revelations

you’re sure you hear folded, hidden
within the all-but-explicit

bitter

taste-like-dirt inside Dinah Washington’s
voice singing This bitter earth

The bitter earth returns in “O Ruin O Haunted”

Love
is the manna

that falling

makes you
see

the desert

surrounding you
is a desert.

Makes you think dirt is not where you were born.

I don’t identify with this voice so much as sense my dark self reflected. Bidart’s poems are vital, apotropaic meditations on love, the choices that cost your life.

Then, seeing the word ART, I woke.

______________
I was happy at the end to find that Bidart included some Notes on his poems, explaining a few allusions. This is the sort of thing, I think, poets are not supposed to do – but for me it was one more appreciated intimacy.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems are so fresh, so vivid and sure. Bidart's work reads like that of a mystic with an agnostic's resolve, a lover of language fearless about philosophizing, sparingly, humbly, who is bared to the ripeness of the moment, the resonant cultural instance and who speaks in phrases newly born but that somehow seem borne from ages ago. The work is simply ALIVE. My list of favorites here includes "Queer," "Dream of the Book," "As You Crave Soul," "Mouth," "Of His Bones Are Coral Made," and "For an Unwritten Opera," followed closely by "Those Nights," "He Is Ava Gardner," "Race," "O Ruin O Haunted," and "Tyrant."

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up because it was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry in September 2013.

I didn't really connect with these poems, partly because you could really feel the age of the poet throughout. He has been there, lived it, and is now reflecting. He writes tributes to opera singers. I can tell he has regrets and I think I may enjoy his earlier works more.

[James Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everybody already knows everything and so everybody is alike, turning into everybody else. Couples only stay together as long as they're necessary to each other. Words are flesh working to become idea. These are some of the thoughts explored in Bidart's Metaphysical Dog. They're poems in which ideas come to the surface slowly. They're arrived at, and the reader is often surprised by them. The form of the poems is sometimes couplets, sometimes single lines. And they seem aphoristic, so that the spaces in the poems allow for and encourage reflection, so that the ideas Bidart seems to tease to the surface can make themselves known. He writes about love, and he writes about art, making us believe that words work--sometimes hard--to become idea.

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

This represents one of the better collections I have read in 2013. So far I have read 51 poetry books this year. What I liked was the accessibility, the poems make sense to me. They cover sex, love, relationships, death, grieving, that sense of belonging; the regular gamut of poetry. As a gay poet writing sometimes on gay themes, his work takes a twist pauses you to think and perhaps react like: oh he's talking about man on man love or sex. I found it interesting and easy to relate to as a gay reader.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Add Bidart to the list of poets I will follow backward and forward, for telling truths like this:

"You cannot tell if
addictions, secret, narcotic,

damage or enlarge
mind, through which you seize the world." (102)

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bidart continues in the mostly lyrical, searching voice he's cultivated since Desire, and he finds a wonderful, quiet grace in these pages.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd not read Bidart before. This is gorgeous stuff. I will now go find all his others.

[Nicole Testa LaLiberty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Socially and politically conscious, while still feeling deeply personal, while never feeling preachy or demanding. A very good read.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book packed a mighty punch for me. Like Louise Gluck, Bidart has a way of distilling language down to brutally truthful statements that unfold over short, heavily enjambed lines:

When what we understand about
what we are

changes, whole
parts of us fall mute.

That's from a poem called "Defrocked," which wasn't my favorite, but even in the poems that didn't totally knock me out, there are moments like this that do. I often felt a really intense recognition, echoes of my experiences not just as a gay man but as a child who recognized early his parents' flaws, as a skeptic, as someone who wants to experience and create beauty from ugliness. The poems find what's universal in queer experience, and what's queer in universal experience.

The book is really cohesive in its use of either couplets or single-line stanzas, usually with the former sandwiched between the latter in an alternating pattern. The poems often examine solitude and coupling, so this formal restraint is an interesting mirror of the content.

Bidart was an early, important player in my seduction to poetry. Particularly, I was seduced by "Herbert White" and "Ellen West," two of his most famous, long poems. This book often reflects on those two pieces (the second, seven-page poem is titled "Writing 'Ellen West'"), so it was fortunate of me to pick up this book, the first full Frank Bidart book I'd read in more than a decade, and connect to my first meeting with his work. I also appreciated the interview at the end of the book, which contains advice about writing I'll carry with me for a long time:

"What's crucial for any writer is to understand how your mind apprehends meaning. How, in your experience, you apprehend significance. Understand it and find a way to embody it, make it have the force for the reader in a work of art that it has for you."

"Getting the dynamics and voice down are what's crucial. Whatever it takes to get the whole soul into a poem. An emphasis on voice isn't fashionable in contemporary practice. I hope my poems make people reconsider that."

He's preaching to the choir with me, but I will definitely take his words as reaffirmation of the fundamental power of voice. This book stoked my poetry fire, big-time.

[kell_xavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

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/10002...
"Queer" - https://poets.org/poem/queer

[Joanne van der Vlies · Rating 3 out of 5]

 • "it must be lifted from the mind / must be lifted and placed elsewhere / must not remain in the mind alone."
 • "We long for the Absolute. Voices you once heard that you can never not hear again, -- ... spoiled priest, liar, if you want something enough, sometimes you think it's there."
 • "Soon all you see is that the ravenous, dependent, rage-ridden brain you inhabit is not a lens, not a prism you have flawlessly honed that transmits light, but this suffocating bubble that encases you, partial, mortal, stained with the creature that created it... You are the creature that created it."

[zakariah · Rating 2 out of 5]

started this like richard siken WHOO ?? but nvm, nvm guys , white gays 😒😒😒

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

"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."

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You resist
strangers until a stranger makes the old hungers

brutally wake."

--from "Like"

[Vivian · Rating 4 out of 5]

some loose, clean words which i felt the shape of more than the actual tedious, reworking act of reading. but obviously extremely beautiful worrying and sometimes frighteningly needle-specific but also probably not. my conceit of dog body and thoughts and sadnesses are not completely original and the door through which we are all pushed out into the light is self-loathing, terror, and mother

[Shaun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heady, difficult poetry that is assuredly WELL worth the time. The "Metaphysical Dog" in this book of poetry is not the poet's dog, Belafont -- by the way, interesting pun there for Belafont, literally translates as "beautiful print" or "beautiful writing." Nope, the metaphysical "dog" is the poet, Frank Bidart, who suffers from a pretty low sense of worth but whose humility is not a false one, no less, for it is bound to when contemplating such difficult, deep subjects.

An "emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of our common life" Mr. Bidart bares his soul and writes about sex, art, death, God, and the "hunger for the Absolute" -- "a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger."

The problem is that as fallible humans with superegos we "must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute [and] our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it." Thus, we can never hope to approach, let alone understand, the Absolute in this lifetime and in that struggle and lack of understanding and occasional glimpses of the Absolute lies art; poetic art to be exact. The idea is best expressed in the concluding line of Bidart's poem entitled "Writing 'Ellen West'" wherein he states,"One more poem, one more book in which you figure out how to make something out of not knowing enough." True dat! Truer words have yet to be written .

The existential angst is likewise captured in the poem entitled, "Elegy for Earth" where Bidart writes:

"In adolescence, you thought your work
ancient work: to decipher at last

human beings' relation to God. Decipher

love. To make what was once whole
whole again: or to see

why it never should have been thought whole."

This book is filled with simply awesome poetry that is far from simple. One of my favorites is "Three Tattoos" where Bidart writes about three random tattoos he sees and the need to elevate the randomness of such words and art,

"It must be lifted from the mind

must be lifted and placed elsewhere
must not remain in the mind alone."

In the poem entitled "Dream Reveals in Neon the Great Addictions" Bidart wrote of love, power, fame, God and art and the cloying antithesis of each:

"Refused love, power, fame, sainthood, your
tactic, like that of a modest

Caesar, is to feign indifference and refusal.
You are addicted to what you cannot possess."

Bidart's troubled relationship with his deceased mother -- "Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall" -- is on display for all the world to see. He plumbs the depths of that relationship for it's source and secrets but can only begin to scratch the surface of understanding and yet, like the Absolute, finds it eludes him. What adult cannot make the same connection and same confession?! The long shadow of our parent's lives and their effect in our's often shades us into obscurity and mystery long after they are gone.

Like T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and the work of artist wordsmith Jenny Holzer, Bidart's poetry looks at the power of the well-turned verse to express our soul or the lack of it. He speaks of such in his endnote about "Of His Bones Are Coral Made":

"I've written little prose about poetry, but can't seem to stop writing poems about poetics. Narrative is the Elephant in the Room when most people discuss poetry. Narrative was never a crucial element in the poetics surrounding the birth of Modernism, though the great works if Modernism, from "The Waste Land" to the "Cantos" to "Home Burial," "Paterson" and beyond, are built on a brilliant sense if the power if narrative. What Modernism added was the power gained when you know what to leave out. Narrative is the ghost scaffolding that gives spine to the great works that haunt the twentieth century."

I hope and trust that in time, the work of Frank Bidart and this book -- "Metaphysical Dog" -- achieves the pinnacle of greatness it richly deserves. Add another book of poetry to my ever-growing list of "favorites."

[Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I usually don't get poetry. I'm glad I got this.

I read Frank Bidart's book of poems, "Metaphysical Dog: Poems" because it was selected by BookmenDC, a LGBT book group.

The hour I spent with the book was wonderful.
Bidart's voice is clear, sparse, and, focused.
I suggest you find a hour, and, a quiet space, and, read the book.

I like Kindle, for the ease of purchase, and, a built in dictionary.
Ganymede is the title of one poem in the book. I had forgot his story. The Kindle dictionary reminded me that Ganymede was a beautiful Trojan boy, taken to Olympus, to be a cup bearer for the gods.

[Jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

Writing 'Ellen West' is one of those life-altering poems. His reflections on his mother are most potent in: "She, who in the last months of her life abandoned writing poems in disgust at the failure of her poems, is a poem." Or, in "Things Falling from Great Heights" "how much the spaces that you now move in cost." This collection is wide-awake, emotive, and filled with metaphysical wonders "high in the airless edifice that is you." Rich with metaphor and caught in elegy, charged with an energy that seeks to, at its core, expel demons.

[Ashley Cale · Rating 5 out of 5]

A semester of Modern Poetry with Frank Bidart was an unforgettable experience! Someone who irrevocably inspires your interpretations of poetry and both enjoys and encourages the deep, prodding, often unanswerable questions in life in our discussions. Beautiful poems written by an equally remarkable soul!

[Jeffery Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Painful, powerful.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Your body will be added to the bodies that piled-up make the structures of the world."

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was a weird, weird book

[Gwendolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

What did I think?
I think the library is fine and good but I need to own this book. Metaphysical Dog was my first introduction to Frank Bidart's work and a heady introduction it is. Frank BidartI love the style, the format, the incredible atmosphere - it has moved the bar for this kind of work, much much higher. It's so good that despite a pile of books to be read, I've read it three times instead.
Like, Hunger for the Absolute, Against Rage, For the AIDS dead, On this earth where no secure foothold is, Three Tattoos, As You crave soul....it's impossible to pick a single specific selection from this. It is, or it can be, a very quick read but I urge you to take your time and savour it. Metaphysical Dog is a collection that demands repeat dives and deep study. (There's a notes section at the end which provides some context but in the main, you are entirely on your own. I love that.)
In presentation, Metaphysical Dog is organized into five sections; I find that reading the sections entire but out of order creates an interesting effect; each piece most definitely stands alone but in aggregate the effect is a melange of Frank Bidart's seemingly effortless mastery of the rhythms of the language.
I must find more of his work immediately.
To say more would be spoilers, but moreover, I shall not deprive you of the joy of experiencing this slick, haunting, opium den of a book. Find a copy immediately.

The Maenad

[LYS. · Rating 3 out of 5]

“[. . .] you despised the world for replacing / God with another addiction, love. / Despised yourself. Was there no third thing?” —“For an Unwritten Opera,” page 108

i’ve seen fractions of bidart’s poetry floating around, specifically from his HALF-LIGHT collection, but this is the first time i’ve truly read a whole work by him. in METAPHYSICAL DOG, these poems straddle your mind and take you for a ride through this interesting medium of platonic idealism and the concreteness (and failures and ecstasies and, and, and—) of the physical body. there are lines that are absolutely gutting, and there were moments where i was reading aloud to get the full effect, to feel the meaning on my tongue. it’s fascinating how his brain works because the words he strings together are just . . . different.

that being said, there’s a blurb by stephen burt on the back of the book in which he says, “Bidart writes through passion, but also through subtraction.” and, after completing the METAPHYSICAL DOG, this is what’s holding me back from truly feeling it, deep in my bones, you know? like there is something about the metaphysical aspect, the “subtraction” that left me outside it. it’s not that i typically expect to fully understand poetry—poetry, in my opinion, does not need to be understood, only felt—but with this, i just felt like i was poking the borders of understanding and feeling. hence, my rating.

anyway, i will be reading the HALF-LIGHT collection at some point in my life. we’ll see if life experience helps hehehe

[Ryan Cahill]

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”.