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by: Frank Bidart
Amazon.com's Price: $21.00 Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780374522711
ISBN: 0374522715
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 280
Publication Date: June 01, 1991
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 227948
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In the Western Night brings together in one volume all of the poems to date, including many previously unpublished poems, of one of the most exciting and gifted poets writing today.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Modernist experiments meet confessional subjects.
The best poems in this book launch themselves from Ezra Pound's experimentation with the use of letters, multiple voices, translation and other decidedly non-poetic materials, disjointedly culling these things together to create meaning in how they resonate off one another. Bidart similarly uses letters, grammatical errors, capitalized words, quotes from journals, etc, to infuse into his poems' forms meaning that is crucial to the emotional and narrative understanding coming from the meaning and ... Read More
Rating:  - Mr. Bidart is our best emotional and fearless poet.
I was confused at Ms. Greens online review of Bidart's collected poems 'In the Western Night'. I would almost hazard a guess that Ms. green had read a different book altogether. Mr. Bidart is one of the few poets of his generation who is both emotionally articulate and uncompromisingly intelligent. He is able, as few are, to look at the darkness or often horror of this world and not patronize it by inventing hope where there isn't any, or relying on empty though pretty lyric gestures to make things ... Read More
Rating: - Bidart's poems solipsistic, unmusical
I recall an old Alan Alda movie, "The Mephisto Waltz," in which a famous pianist, about to die, conducts an occult ritual in order to transfer his soul, personality, and musical talent into the body of another man. Similarly, Frank Bidart appropriates and inserts himself into the biographies of other people without seeming to derive any insight into their personalities, their self-understanding. For Bidart -- or, at least, for Bidart's poetry -- the only self that seems really to exist is Bidart's own. ... Read More
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