Desire : Poems

Rating:
Summary: Read Ovid AND Bidart!
Review: "The Second Hour of the Night" is probably the best long poem written in English in the past few decades. This book was robbed of the Pulitzer, and is worth buying (or just reading) for it alone. The first half of the book is, honestly, just filler. But the second, final poem makes up for it!

Rating:
Summary: Emotional articulation at its best
Review: For some people the book might be self-indulgent, and Bidart "boring and self-aggrandizing" but Bidart is probably the most emotionally articulate writer of American poetry today. In this book Bidart proves his range, from the sweeping grandeur of "The second hour of the night" to the expansiveness of such gestures of restlessness found in "The yoke":

I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and

The question is, what's wrong with being self-indulgent if it serves the collection's purposes. Once more Bidart continues with his range of the English language through typographical manipulation on the page.

Rating:
Summary: Read Ovid instead.
Review: This book is self-indulgent tripe ... there's a fine line between the wonderful tradition of rewriting and reinterpreting previously-told stories (see Ann Carson's Autobiography of Red for an absolutely glittering example) and just retelling. In this case, the story of Cineras and Myrra is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses and spun out in excruciating detail. The difference between Ovid (and for that matter Carson) and Bidart is that the former poets use interesting language, whereas Bidart's is boring and self-aggrandizing.