Watching the Spring Festival

Desire is Frank Bidart’s great subject—how it abuses and disfigures us. In his latest volume, the poet continues to limn the half-life of love’s failures, but with a new specter—age—further darkening his vision. Writing these poems in his late sixties, Bidart is haunted by squandered opportunities (“When I had eyes what did I do with sight”) and death: “What none knows is when, not if.”

Bidart’s approach might be described as postconfessional—revelation, but through the masks of personae: Each of his previous volumes was anchored by a stunning long monologue, in which the poet dramatized a real-life tragic figure like Nijinsky or Ellen West, an anorexic patient analyzed by Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. Perhaps because this is the author’s first volume without such a long poem, the shorter lyrics seem more transparent and urgently personal. From lines of self-punishing austerity, Bidart’s own story emerges: that of a gay man who has remained unhappily “free” by choosing always the “wrong” objects for his love (“even at eleven, what you love is / what you should not love”).

A protégé of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (whose Collected Poems he edited), Bidart now seems closer to poets of fragmentary difficulty: Paul Celan, Rae Armantrout and ancients like Sappho (whose extant work comes to us necessarily fragmented). Bidart displays a scrupulous attention to how words can be fraught with heaviness, but it’s his respect for the white space of the page—the silence—that keeps his verbal constructions from growing overwrought. In fact, Bidart’s art is at its most powerful when it points away from meaning and approaches the unspeakable: “A good photograph tells you everything / that’s really going on is invisible.”