Bidart Takes on Death

books:


	• Watching the Spring Festival: Poems Frank Bidart Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 72 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Bidart Takes on Death

This is a simply extraordinary collection of poems by Frank Bidart, who is quickly becoming recognized, alongside Louise Glück, as an influential master in contemporary poetry. This book can perhaps be best understood as a companion, rather than a standalone collection: it is best to have an understanding of Bidart's style and work from, say, _In the Western Night_ and _Star Dust_ than it is to start reading him with this book.

He makes his intent clear in the end of Under Julian, C362 A.D. that "the fewer the gestures that can, in the future,/ be, the sweeter those left to you to make." It seems, given this perspective, that the title, _Watching the Spring Festival_, suggests a spring that has come, whereas this book really remains steeped in an autumn of sorts. Each of these poems, in some way, explores death and mortality, and many of them look back, whether to earlier poems in this volume (there is a large degree of self-referentiality, and the poem Watching the Spring Festival, late in the book, forces the translation Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake to be reread), to Bidart's earlier volumes (there is a new translation of Catullus' Odi et Amo that perhaps needs a rereading of the translation in _Desire_ to make sense), to those of his mentor, Robert Lowell (Like Lightning Across an Open Field takes from Lowell's The Days in _Day by Day_), and to the early forms that originally constituted poetry (If See No End In Is acts as a wonderful update of the sestina form, with the envoi suggestively gone).

A number of Bidart's readers have complained that, although _Star Dust_ was well-executed, they missed the dominant typography that characterized his earlier books. Bidart has returned to his experimental mode, especially in Hymn and Song, rarely eschewing his trademark rhythm of couplets alternated with single-line stanzas. And, although there is no Fourth Hour of the Night here (can that be expected before Bidart dies?), the longer poems are wonderful: Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before the Camera Giselle is every bit as mysterious and iconoclastic as Ellen West and The War of Vaslav Nijinsky have been, while Collector is an entirely new direction for Bidart. This poem, set from the rest by several blank pages, moves away from the death-motif of the text and looks ahead, telling the reader that "The rituals/ you love imply that, repeating them,// you store seeds that promise// the end of ritual." Here is the spring that the reader has anticipated, but has not been able to watch.

All in all, this book absolutely lived up to my expectations and certainly will help to affirm Bidart's place in the canon of contemporary poetry. I absolutely recommend it, especially for those who have already read some of Frank Bidart's other work.

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This is Frank Bidart?s first book of lyrics?his first book not dominated by long poems. Narrative elaboration becomes speed and song. Less embattled than earlier work, less actively violent, these new poems have, by conceding time?s finalities and triumphs, acquired a dark radiance unlike anything seen before in Bidart?s long career. Mortality?imminent, not theoretical?forces the self to question the relation between the actual life lived and what was once the promise of transformation. This plays out against a broad landscape. The book opens with Marilyn Monroe, followed by the glamour of the eighth-century Chinese imperial court (seen through the eyes of one of China?s greatest poets, Tu Fu). At the center of the book is an ambitious meditation on the Russian ballerina Ulanova, Giselle, and the nature of tragedy. All this gives new dimension and poignance to Bidart?s recurring preoccupation with the human need to leave behind some record or emblem, a made thing that stands, in the face of death, for the possibilities of art. Bidart, winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, is widely acknowledged as one of the significant poets of his time. This is perhaps his most accessible, mysterious, and austerely beautiful book.

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