Star Dust: Poems [Hardcover]

Frank Bidart (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374269734 | ISBN-13: 978-0374269739 | Publication Date: May 26, 2005 | Edition: First Edition

In 2002, Frank Bidart published a sequence of poems, Music Like Dirt, the first chapbook ever to be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. From the beginning, he had conceived this sequence as the opening movement in a larger structure--now, with Star Dust, finally complete.

Throughout his work, Bidart has been uniquely alert to the dramatic possibilities of violence; in this, and in his sense of theater, he resembles the great Jacobean dramatists. It is no accident that Webster's plays echo in "The Third Hour of the Night," the brilliant long poem that dominates the second half of Star Dust. Bidart locates in Benvenuto Cellini the speaker truest to his own vision. Who better to speak of the drive to create, not as reverie or pleasure or afterthought, but as task and burden, thwarted by the world? In its scale, sonorities, extraordinary leaps, and juxtapositions, "The Third Hour of the Night" makes an astonishing counterbalance to the intense, spare lyrics that precede it.

In this profound and unforgettable new book, the dream beyond desire (which now seems to represent human destiny) is rooted in the drive to create, a drive tormented at every stage by failure, as the temporal being fights for its survival by making an eternal life. Bidart is a poet of passionate originality, and Star Dust shows that the forms of this originality continue to deepen and change as he constantly renews his contract with the idea of truth.

 

Star Dust is a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"We are creatures who need to make," writes Bidart, succinctly expressing the argument of his recent chapbook, Music Like Dirt, which comprises one half of this new volume. Music Like Dirt was the first chapbook ever to be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, deservedly so. In it, Bidart, with characteristic ruthlessness, outlines an aesthetic theory so basic that it applies to all of us. The theory begins with Bidart's long-standing interest in fusing the body and the mind, so that the body becomes the fundament of vision and spirit. It's a notion captured famously in a line from Bidart's Desire: "I hate and-love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails / itself, hanging crucified." Now Bidart extends the theory further to fuse existence with creativity: "But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal." Not surprisingly, tropes of sculpture, where art and corporeality meet most literally, dominate this collection. The body that would crucify itself now sculpts itself, albeit violently: "The stone arm raising a stone hammer / dreams it can descend upon itself." These themes bleed into the more personal lyrics present in the second half of this volume, most notably in "Curse," a poem of articulate fury addressed to the masterminds of September 11. Sculpture and self-creation resume the stage in "The Third Hour of the Night," a long poem in the voice of Benvenuto Cellini, renaissance sculptor and murderer. Throughout the collection, Bidart alternates between prosy explication and knotted, unpunctuated verse that enacts the poet's chief image: "within stone / the mind writhes." Bidart has recently emerged from the long and relatively thankless editorship of Robert Lowell's collected poems; Star Dust redoubles his claim to his own fame.
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Review

Praise for In the Western Night:

"Achieves a grandeur of vision few poets nowadays can match." --Alan Shapiro, Chicago Tribune

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (May 26, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374269734
• ISBN-13: 978-0374269739
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,215,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars STAR DUST , a page turner, May 29, 2005

By 

Margarita Lluria (Miami, Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Star Dust: Poems (Hardcover)

Frank Bidart's STAR DUST is something like a perfect book of poems. It has a beginning, middle and end and never stops being a good--which is to say gripping, even suspenseful-- read . The opening section of poems, a sequence called "Music Like Dirt," works like a prologue to a collection of poems about making, about the project of being-in-the world through the lens of the maker. The final long poem, "The Third Hour of the Night," about the sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, is both a culmination of this meditiation and a subversion of the ideas put forth in the earlier poems. This is an unsettling, brilliant, beautifully made and deeply moving book of poems. And unlike many contemporary books of poems, it is direct, accessible and deeply interesting (the way novels are interesting) from start to finish. Yet it repays re-reading and study for its formal virtuosity and variety.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Another book that makes me ask what poetry actually is., July 19, 2006

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Star Dust: Poems (Paperback)

Frank Bidart, Star Dust (FSG, 2005)

I've just wandered through the already-posted Amazon reviews on this one, and it's pretty obvious that I'm in the minority. So I'll apologize beforehand, since it's obvious I'm wrong. After all, this collection was, in fact, a National Book Award finalist, though it lost to Merwin's Migration. Despite the overwhelming evidence that I am, in fact, wrong, I have to stick to my guns-- I just didn't like it anywhere near as much as everyone else seems to have.

First off, "The Third Hour of the Night" has to be addressed. The dramatic monologue, as a poetic device, has a long and revered history, as well it should. But the vast majority of dramatic monologues throughout the ages have been presented to us in formal verse, which allows for a freer language, because poetically it still has the form to fall back on; it's still unquestionably poetry. Doing dramatic monologues in free verse is exceptionally tricky; if you fall back into unpoetic language, you risk the entire house of cards toppling down around you, with your monologue looking like a speech that's been chopped up into little lines. It's worse when you're relating history. He central part of "The Third Hour of the Night," which takes up about a quarter of Star Dust's total length, tells us about Benvenuto Cellini. It's certainly not straight biographical information, but it still borders on the prosaic, and crosses over that line far too many times during its length. I know there's a lot of argument over this point, but to me, if it's too prosaic too many times, I simply can't look at it seriously as poetry.

Bookending the tome with "The Third Hour of the Night" is the chapbook Music Like Dirt, which focuses on the desire to create-- the primal, inborn desire. It would be easy to make cracks here about the primal urge needing some revision before it gets thrown to the wolves, but let's face it-- "The Third Hour of the Night" took up a whole issue of Poetry magazine in 2004. An entire issue. They've never done that before. Ever. And Poetry is the pinnacle. Whither goeth Poetry goeth a nation. Certainly whither goeth Poetry goeth the National Book Association.

But I still can't find a reason to consider it better than average. It's not worse than average, certainly, given how much less accomplished prosaic nonsense finds its way into magazines and webzines on a monthly basis, but it's not better, either. **

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars There is Skill and ThenThere is Enjoyment, August 3, 2007

By 

J. A Carty "Jessie Carty" (Charlotte, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Star Dust: Poems (Paperback)

Sometimes I am reluctant to write reviews of the poetry I read. This is certainly a time when I was. I am certainly not a poet who has the reknown or the publication history of Frank Bidart but I do still have an opinion.

Reading _Star Dust_ was difficult. Not only is the poetry in a very academic style, but the poems are also replete w/ allusions to music and art. If these poems were in a school anthology there would have been a plethora of endnotes. We, however, were not given the help of that so I found other ways to discern what Bidart's references were all about.

I can see the skill of Frank Bidart. He is well educated and has an amazing ability to make his poems reflect upon each other as is best apparent with the final poem and how it relates to the earlier poems in the collection.

All this good and bad being said, for me, this isn't a book I would read again. I don't mind being challenged but I came away from this collection feeling that I was just being challenged because the poet was capable of doing so. This is not a collection I would read again.

I would say, however, that if you are looking for a good challenge-a puzzle-then sit with google and a marker and just see the layers that Bidart is capable of. It can be an adventure.