Customer Reviews

Desire: Poems

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Bidart's poetry resonates with painful honesty. He is truly one of the greatest living poets. This is a beautiful collection.

"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!

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This is a very short book. I enjoyed some of its first half when I read it. Then, but for two poems, I didn't even care to read the rest more than once. I tried, but it had little to no emotional impact. I love, love, love his interpretation of Catullus's Odi Et Amo -- love it. I'd say it's worth the price of admission, but... there it is right in the book description above, to be easily printed out and saved (and only one version is in this book). I couldn't get into the second half at all, the long (half-book length) poem based on Ovid's work. I liked the idea more than its execution; I was bored.

The book is good; his style is good, but somehow only two poems stuck with me; "Odi Et Amo" (called Catullus: Excrucior here) and the one the other reviewer mentioned, with the line, "I wake and sleep and wake and sleep...." I think reading the same number of poems of his, on the internet, would suffice. If you love the Catulus poem like I do -- in its original, there are other English-speaking poets who've also written interesting interpretations -- I particularly like Ezra Pound's.

Frank Bidart's the best American Poetry's got

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.