Watching the Spring Festival: Poems (Hardcover)

by Frank Bidart (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In his seventh book, Bidart condenses his searing, guilt-ridden meditations on the possibilities and limits of the imagination into shorter lyrics, as opposed to the long poems for which he is known. Mostly written in the second person, this speaker addresses himself, fighting the fear that ...all that releases/ transformation in us is illusion with the flailing hope that, [t]he rituals// you love imply that, repeating them,/ you store seeds that promise/ the end of ritual. Bidart's rituals of consolation include replaying records from the early decades of recorded music; revisiting and revising old, failed loves (...you persuade yourself that it can be/ reversed because he teasingly sprinkles/ evasive accounts of his erotic history); watching a film of the aging Russian dancer Ulanova, who is too old to dance something but the world wants to record it; and learning caution and peace from the Tu Fu poem from which the collection takes its title. In his most intimate and vulnerable book, Bidart enacts a troubled longing to parse the real from the merely imaginary, the transcendent from the merely real, which is answered, even if incompletely, only by the human capacity to create, as the irreparable enters me again, again me it twists. (Apr.)
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From Booklist
Bidart’s first collection not dominated by one or more long narratives shows him concerned, hardly for the first time, with the resonance of the old saw ars longa, vita brevis. The title poem and its cognate, “Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival across Serpentine Lake,” participate in an artistic life begun in 753 with an extravagant imperial court celebration that one of China’s greatest poets witnessed—an imaginative life that links, across the centuries, human death and persistent artistry, unfortunately with the impotent fury that beautiful longevity arouses. The inability to clearly and logically connect art’s endurance and life’s transience doesn’t lessen the feelings, the fury, felt because of the connection. Catullus said something similar about life and love in his famous couplet beginning, “Odi et amo” (“I hate and I love”), Bidart’s version of which appears between the festival poems. A different reaction to the same conundrum of life and art—awe, not rage—is also conveyed, unforgettably by the volume’s longest piece, “Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances before a Camera Giselle.” Bidart, though “difficult,” is nonpareil. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 72 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374286035
• ISBN-13: 978-0374286033
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #571,147 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bidart Takes on Death, May 23, 2008

By	Contemporary Poetry Afficionado - See all my reviews

This is a simply extraordinary collection of poems by Frank Bidart, who is quickly becoming recognized, alongside Louise Glück, as an influential master in contemporary poetry. This book can perhaps be best understood as a companion, rather than a standalone collection: it is best to have an understanding of Bidart's style and work from, say, _In the Western Night_ and _Star Dust_ than it is to start reading him with this book.

He makes his intent clear in the end of Under Julian, C362 A.D. that "the fewer the gestures that can, in the future,/ be, the sweeter those left to you to make." It seems, given this perspective, that the title, _Watching the Spring Festival_, suggests a spring that has come, whereas this book really remains steeped in an autumn of sorts. Each of these poems, in some way, explores death and mortality, and many of them look back, whether to earlier poems in this volume (there is a large degree of self-referentiality, and the poem Watching the Spring Festival, late in the book, forces the translation Tu Fu Watches the Spring Festival Across Serpentine Lake to be reread), to Bidart's earlier volumes (there is a new translation of Catullus' Odi et Amo that perhaps needs a rereading of the translation in _Desire_ to make sense), to those of his mentor, Robert Lowell (Like Lightning Across an Open Field takes from Lowell's The Days in _Day by Day_), and to the early forms that originally constituted poetry (If See No End In Is acts as a wonderful update of the sestina form, with the envoi suggestively gone).

A number of Bidart's readers have complained that, although _Star Dust_ was well-executed, they missed the dominant typography that characterized his earlier books. Bidart has returned to his experimental mode, especially in Hymn and Song, rarely eschewing his trademark rhythm of couplets alternated with single-line stanzas. And, although there is no Fourth Hour of the Night here (can that be expected before Bidart dies?), the longer poems are wonderful: Ulanova at Forty-Six at Last Dances Before the Camera Giselle is every bit as mysterious and iconoclastic as Ellen West and The War of Vaslav Nijinsky have been, while Collector is an entirely new direction for Bidart. This poem, set from the rest by several blank pages, moves away from the death-motif of the text and looks ahead, telling the reader that "The rituals/ you love imply that, repeating them,// you store seeds that promise// the end of ritual." Here is the spring that the reader has anticipated, but has not been able to watch.

All in all, this book absolutely lived up to my expectations and certainly will help to affirm Bidart's place in the canon of contemporary poetry. I absolutely recommend it, especially for those who have already read some of Frank Bidart's other work.