Customer Reviews

Star Dust: Poems

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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.

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. **

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.

I have very little doubt that Frank Bidart is a
major American poet. What do I mean by that? I mean
that he has brought into American poetry something
altogether new - a voice that attempts to explore the
large questions about the human condition using the
ages old form of dramatic monologue in a completely
new way. To date, there are several such long "Bidart"
poems: "Herbert White", "Ellen West", "The War of
Vaslav Nijinsky", "The Second Hour of the Night" and
now, in this new collection, "The Third Hour of the
Night". The ambition of this life-long project is
enormous. The fact that his craft continues to live up
to this ambition is what makes Bidart a very special author at work today. In book after book after book he has
given us long, intense, self-contained poems that
explore essential components of human condition--from
our desire to our desire to make--with seriousness and
unmistakable genius. Genius is not a word I hesitate
to use when I write about Frank Bidart's life-long
work. This is the poet who has more in common with
Dostoevsky than with any of our contemporaries. Bidart
disdains the issues (such as critical theory or Irony,
with a capital "I", for instance) that obsess poets
today. Instead, he asks essential questions about what
it is to live in our time; he struggles with large,
unembarrassed emotions and original, serious ideas,
blending them together with force and spark.
This new collection, "Stardust," is particularly
interesting for its extended meditation on our wish to
be challenged by our actions, our need to produce
something meaningful from our time on this planet ("my
father's ring was B with a dart / through it, in
diamonds against polished black stone. // I have it.
What parents leave you / is their lives. Until my
mother died she struggled to make / a house that she
did not loathe; paintings; poems; me. / Many creatures
must / make, but only one must seek / within itself
what to make."). This exploration of creativity
culminates in "The Third Hour of the Night" where
Bidart spins the story of the Italian sculptor,
Benvenuto Cellini, asking moral questions in a
dramatic narrative rich with murder and desire to make
something beautiful, lasting enough to contain human
spirit. As unpredictable as the process of making
itself, the poem begins in Western notions of (and
struggle with) morality, and blends into an African
element of magic where violence and beauty are one
("In this universe anybody can kill anybody / with a
stick. What gods gave me / is their gift, the power to
bury within each / creature the hour it ceases. /
Everyone knows I have powers but not such power. / If
they knew I would be so famous / they would kill me. /
I tell you because your tongue is stone. / If the gods
ever give you words, one night in / sleep you will
wake to find me above you.) Here, Bidart does not just
expand on Stevens' dictum that "death is a mother of
beauty" - he makes of it a human necessity in a
beautifully written and highly vocal drama.
What is also striking for me about this new collection is how
many first rate short lyrics it contains. In Bidart's
earlier books he rarely included more than five or six
short poems along with his trademark long dramatic
monologue. This collection includes twenty two short
pieces, many of which (my own favorites-"Song",
"Romain Clerou", "The Soldier Who Guards the
Frontier", "Phenomenology of the Prick," "Curse,"
"Lament for the Makers," "Heart Beat," "Injunction",
"Hammer," "Luggage", "For Bill Nestrick")are destined to be
taught in schools and anthologized. His use of classical drama, most notably Shakespeare ("go make you ready") and the Jacobins is dazzling, and it further deepens the psychological
effect of his work. The fact that this Master poet, at
this stage of his career, is still changing his style,
unafraid to find and use new things is deeply
satisfying. There is more skill in Bidart's "Stardust"
than in all new-formalists and l-a-n-g-u-a-g-e poets
combined; the effects of his work are dizzying with
their musical unpredictability and narrative logic.
This is a book of beautiful, memorable poetry. I recommend it highly. --Ilya Kaminsky

The poems in Frank Bidart's STAR DUST are a world unto themselves. They provide all the nourishment one needs from literature by exploring what is most deeply definitive about our humanity: our ability to love and to fail at love and our ability to create. The final poem of the book, the long "Third Hour of the Night" about the Florentine sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, reads like a nineteenth century European novel : its narrative fairly gallops. And like Dostoevsky, Bidart unflinchingly forces us to face the most difficult and urgent moral questions. Like his shaman in the final poem, Bidart dares to extract the heart of his subjects in order to examine it and then put it back. With Bidart as our guide we can travel through the underworld of his dark world vision and emerge edified and strengthened, if not entirely cleansed.

Frank Bidart is a master of passionate language, on the order of Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. Star Dust is one of his pivotal books. Start with the short poems teasing out the ambivalences and consolations of loneliness, regret, desire, fury, and creativity. End with the difficult masterpiece, "The Third Hour of the Night." As our public existence seems to drift inexorably downwards, it is a wonderful revelation that such a poet lives among us. Reading these poems one feels alternately shattered and uplifted.

These poems are yet another extension of Bidart's talent and extraordinary ability to paint a picture for us through words - his choice AND placement of them!