Product Description
In the Western Night brings together in one volume all of the poems to date, including many previously unpublished poems, of one of the most exciting and gifted poets writing today.
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Customer Reviews (3)

Modernist experiments meet confessional subjects.
The best poems in this book launch themselves from Ezra Pound's experimentation with the use of letters, multiple voices, translation and other decidedly non-poetic materials, disjointedly culling these things together to create meaning in how they resonate off one another.Bidart similarly uses letters, grammatical errors, capitalized words, quotes from journals, etc, to infuse into his poems' forms meaning that is crucial to the emotional and narrative understanding coming from the meaning and music of the words themselves.An important achievement.

Bidart's success at this is in part what makes readers blow off Pound's Cantos.Bidart's interest is in human relations, and illustrated these through small interactions.While Pound had similar goals in mind, he never stayed long in the personal interaction, jumping so quickly to usury, metamorphosis, and other topics and grand modernist allusiveness.The reader feels to put-out.Bidart stayed with the people, with their hurt.Lowell taught this.Readers can argue the effectiveness, can worry about whether it is wrong for a writer to take interest in his/her own life, but Bidart has in his poems fused two hugely important poetic movements, and has enlarged the understanding of what poetry can be.

Mr. Bidart is our best emotional and fearless poet.
I was confused at Ms. Greens online review of Bidart's collected poems 'In the Western Night'. I would almost hazard a guess that Ms. green had read a different book altogether. Mr. Bidart is one of the few poets of hisgeneration who is both emotionally articulate and uncompromisinglyintelligent. He is able, as few are, to look at the darkness or oftenhorror of this world and not patronize it by inventing hope where thereisn't any, or relying on empty though pretty lyric gestures to make things'all right'. His radical, and neccesary, punctuation was come too over thecourse of his first two books.The punctuation, as Jonathan Galassi andDonald Hall have pointed out, informs the poem as deeply as line breaks do.It seems to me that Mr. Bidart's poems are some of the few that can hold anhonest dialogue with the violence that we are a part of today.He is, in theend, a surprising and wonderful poet.

Bidart's poems solipsistic, unmusical
I recall an old Alan Alda movie, "The Mephisto Waltz," in which a famous pianist, about to die, conducts an occult ritual in order to transfer his soul, personality, and musical talent into the body of another man.Similarly, Frank Bidart appropriates and inserts himself into the biographies of other people without seeming to derive any insight into their personalities, their self-understanding. For Bidart -- or, at least, for Bidart's poetry -- the only self that seems really to exist is Bidart's own.

The problem is not only that Bidart, as one reviewer has noted, lacks the style or imagination to differentiate between the various characters populating his poems.It's that none of Bidart's characters ARE characters.The client on the psychotherapist's couch in "Confessional," the mad dancer Nijinsky of "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky," the anorectic title character of "Ellen West," even the necrophilic child-murderer of Bidart's early poem "Herbert White" are, in some sense, nobody but Bidart:each character explains his or her own dilemmas in the same way that Bidart explains his own.In "Confessional," Bidart conflates his own story of a mother whom he perceived as a "smotherer" with an anecdote about a strangled cat borrowed from the memoirs of the late 19th-century British travel writer Augustus Hare because, as Bidart reveals to Mark Halliday in a 1983 interview, "I needed it. Everything else in the poem had to be 'true.'"(The interview, originally published in Ploughshares, is included in this volume).Similarly, in his so-called "persona" poems, Bidart invests the lives of his characters with his own self-understanding.There is no attempt to apprehend THEIR self-understandings.

However solipsistic his means, Bidart appears in his poems to be making a sincere effort to understand his own suffering.But self-understanding -- or, as it appears several times in his poems, "insight" -- is in the end no match for his apparent need to maintain an aesthetic which turns suffering into an objet d'art, a decoration, while ignoring the more fundamental truths of suffering in a century that has been rife with it.

Bidart's prosody is also unconvincing.It is nonmetrical, depending -- as all verse depends -- on line breaks, stanza breaks, and white space to get how to read it across to the reader; and also on idiosyncratic use of punctuation, italics, and capitalization.None of this is objectionable in itself.But unfortunately the language Bidart uses is unmusical, unremarkable, even dull, and dressing it up in capital letters and italics doesn't change it.The principal effect of the all-caps is to make readers feel as though they should shout as they read. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (7)

There is Skill and ThenThere is Enjoyment
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.

Another book that makes me ask what poetry actually is.
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. **

Bidart is a major poet
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

Wonderful.
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!

Poems of Tenderness and Daring
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. Thefinal poem of the book, the long "Third Hour of the Night" about the Florentine sculptor, BenvenutoCellini,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 underworldof his dark world vision and emerge edified and strengthened, if not entirely cleansed. ... Read more

Product Description
Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

I hate and--love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified.--from "Catullus: Excrucior" In Frank Bidart's collection of poems, the encounter with desire is the encounter with destiny. The first half contains some of Bidart's most luminous and intimate work-poems about the art of writing, Eros, and the desolations and mirror of history (in a spectacular narrative based on Tacitus). The second half of the book exts the overt lyricism of the opening section into even more ambitious territory-"The Second Hour of the Night" may be Bidart's most profound and complex meditation on the illusion of will, his most seductive dramatic poem to date.
Amazon.com Review
Desire, Frank Bidart's first book since In the Western Night:Collected Poems 1965-1990, is in two parts. Part I is a collection ofshort poems; Part II consists of a single poem, "The Second Hour of theNight," a sequel to "The First Hour of the Night" that ends In the Western Night. Bidart, a poet who makes a large arc between the universal andthe idiosyncratic, has learned that the transformations themselves,rendered without comment, have the capacity to chill your blood.

The source for "The Second Hour of the Night" is Ovid's story of Myrrhaand her father Cinyras, one of the least-known but most suggestivetales--a reversal of the Oedipus myth. Bidart's tormenteddramatization of Ovid's version reads like an investigation into thedeepest layers of the story. While both poets turn the doomed heroineinto a plant, Bidart looks into causes and motivation in a way that Oviddoes not.

The short poems in the first section of Desire are also verystrong. The poet, torn apart by the death of his lover, givesyou a sense of the distance he has traveled over the past 15 yearswhen he retranslates the two-line poem "Catullus: Excrucior," which hebrilliantly adapted in The Sacrifice.

Version in The Sacrifice:

I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even
wants the fly while writhing.

Customer Reviews (4)

Okay, but not worth buying
-
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.

Read Ovid AND Bidart!
"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!

Read Ovid instead.
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 glitteringexample) and just retelling.In this case, the story of Cineras and Myrrais taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses and spun out in excruciating detail. The difference between Ovid (and for that matter Carson) and Bidart is thatthe former poets use interesting language, whereas Bidart's is boring andself-aggrandizing.

A powerful, wonderful collection
Frank Bidart's the best American Poetry's got ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

Bidart Takes on Death
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. ... Read more

Product Description
In 2001, Bidart received the Wallace Stevens Award, given by the Academy of American Poets. The judges were Eavan Boland, Louise Glück, Wendy Lesser, James Longenbach, and Carl Phillips. Jury chair Louise Glück writes:"Since the publication, in 1973, of Golden State, Frank Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country. He has given form for our age to what is most urgent and most private in the human soul: the ordeals of solitude and mortality and hunger and, recently, that action through which being speaks: the drive to make or create. Bidart’s poems sound like no one else’s; they look like no one else’s: to accommodate the requirement of his art, that the voice be precisely enacted in its every variation and hesitation, Bidart has made of his form a theatre: if the voice must be confined to the page, it will exploit that page, extend its possibilities.

His work has been, from the start, remarkable in its disdain for the soothing, the sentimental, the facile, the partial. He is, in the feeling of our jury, one of the great poets of our time." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

"modern" trash
I was originally assigned to read this collection of "poems" during my final year of high school and I didn't enjoy them much at all. I found that they were cryptic, humorless, and lacking in both wordplay and cleverness.
Still, I thought that four years later upon my completion of college, perhaps there would be more there. I thought that perhaps I was naive and had missed the point. And so I decided to give Music Like Dirt another try.
But after a second reading -- and then a third, I found myself thinking the same things all over again and then wishing I could award 0 stars. This book is a waste of space. It pangs of "art for art's sake" and loses itself in its vagueness. Moreover, the challenge of writing poetry (that is writing in verse as opposed to writing in prose) is the challenge of working within constraints. It is about playing games with words and committing to a form and then using it to flourish. Bidart does none of these things.Instead he comes up with a collection of randomly arranged lines, none of which contain things called literary devices. This is the kind of stuff that is so random and obtuse that one feels as though anyone could do it just as long as they could get over the embarrassment ofallowing themselves to show such crap to others. He may as well have pooped on the pages. At least then teachers would be more hesitant to assign it.

Thrilling to the last drop
I wish Bidart were more prolific, but on the bright side, each rare collection is an irresistible distillation of some thought-elixir. "Music Like Dirt" treats how humans are essentially art-making, art-sharing creatures. Since this is Bidart, we get both the good and evil consequences of this impulse - the grotesques along with the geniuses - in language that is simple, clear, but also finely wrought and deeply emotional.

Note that this is a chapbook, so even though it's beautifully printed it still has something of a flimsy feeling... It's perfectly sized and shaped to be a little gift to the favorite creative or artistic person in your life.

The real standouts in the collection, "For the Twentieth Century," "Advice to the Players," and "Lament for the Makers," are all available online, albeit coarsened by lousy layout and banner ads. Don't just read them quickly at your desk; print them out and read them somewhere peaceful in solitude, and you will probably end up wanting to buy the book anyway, they're that good. ... Read more

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Product Description
Edmund Wilson wrote of Robert Lowell that he was the "only recent American poet - if you don't count Eliot - who writes successfully in the language and cadence and rhyme of the resounding English tradition". Frank Bidart and David Gewanter have compiled a comprehensive edition of Lowell's poems, from the early triumph of "Lord Weary's Castle", winner of the Pulitzer Prize, through the brilliant willfulness of his "Imitations" of Sappho, Baudelaire, Rilke and other masters, to the late spontaneity of his "History", winner of another Pulitzer, and of his last book of poems, "Day by Day". This volume includes several poems never previously connected, as well as a selection of Lowell's intriguing drafts. As Randall Jarrell said, "You feel before reading any new poem of his the uneasy expectation of perhaps encountering a masterpiece". Lowell's "Collected Poems" offers the first opportunity to view the entire range of his astonishing verse. ... Read more

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Word count: 3607. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on January 1, 2004. The length of the article is 3716 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Frank Bidart's poetry: the substance of the invisible.(Essays)(Critical Essay)
Author: Carol Moldaw
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2004
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: 62Issue: 1Page: 48(11)

Article Type: Critical Essay

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Customer Reviews (7)

collecxted poems of Robert Lowell
Not having read Robert Lowell's poems previously, I was delighted with their acessiblity and being a Boston area resident, I enjoyed their local references.I think I had hesitated to read another "confessional" poet having had my fill of Plath, but Lowell is very different and poem after poem pleased me.

A Tribute, Not a Review
I studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard in 1963 & 1964. I wouldn't presume to review his Collected Poems, only to testify that he was a giant of a human -- witty, sensitive even toward brash young would-be poets, immensely knowledgeable, immensely conscientious. Having known him remains one of the great privileges of my life. Reading his poems is a great privilege for all of us.

In His Exasperating Wholeness
The publication of this book was doubtless necessary to begin understanding Lowell correctly.Creator and destroyer, careful wordsmith and subversive deconstructor, encountering just one of his volumes along the strange parabola of his career can be confusing.Lowell always set out to carefully craft each of them, with special attention to the arrangement of his resonant poems and their slow, grand, building cumulative effect.To let you know the game, Lowell presented almost each of his volumes with an evocative frontpiece engraving by Francis Parkman -- the poet thus visually setting forth each of his works, in advance of his death, as another controlled chess move against the great opponent Fame -- the act of a control fanatic if there ever was one.

Yet somewhere in the middle of Lowell's career of creating the little volumes, more violently toward the end of his years as diseases took over, the mad Doppleganger Cal (Lowell's nickname to his insider pals) enters, seeds the serene clouds with fury, and all hell breaks loose. At worst, all is botched:mere beautiful poetic scraps, a line or two amongst literary gossip for insiders, yesterday's obnoxious news.In hindsight Cal indeed did a pretty good job; it is easier to just turn away from the mess.But Lowell is so good at his best, so earnest even in his madness, that we are going to miss something significant about our own history -- the subject which most deeply concerned him -- if we do.And finally, even at his worst, there is always something very endearing about this voice, something very human and honest.Lowell was plagued with true and furious organic disorders which disrupted his personality; his issues were not only self-inflicted.In an earlier age he would not have lived out the length of career he did; in significant ways, then, his voice is a truly new one on the block.Unfortunately for him, the hyped up madness of his period identified with his genuine madness and made a pathetic celebrity of him, which didn't help the brave and fragile personality struggling to make poetic sense of a disturbed time.

Bidart has picked up the pieces and presented Lowell as one, that's all, in all his exasperating wholeness.Now it is easier to see that Lowell and Cal were one, that the lasting work of worth emerges from their furious wrestling.Over time he was many kinds of a writer and a poet, and certainly not all of them will last.He left some absolute foolishness he only got away with because of his name and the looniness at large which seized on him about the same time it seized on Batman and Laugh-In -- junk like the plays in the Old Glory.But when you remember that this was a truly sick man and not just another boozed out writer, you wonder at the absolute clarity of the best work, and the occasional glimmers which never entirely disappeared.Doubtless much later, a generation free of the diseases we still to a degree share with this poet will make the appropriate selection.In the meantime, in a real sense, the record Bidart has compiled shows that the bell tolls for us, too.

A Masterful Collection (and very well-edited)
I believe that Lowell's work is best viewed through this expansive collection. No single book of his poetry truly captures the full breadth of his literary accomplishments. Of course, if you're only looking for an introduction to his work, Life Studies or For the Union Dead would probably do.

But if you really want to understand the full scope of his talent, then this book is indispensable. I would even go so far as to say that this book will probably cement Lowell's place among America's finest poets in years to come.

Collected Poems by Lowell
This is an excellent work in belles lettres literature.
The author covers a range of poems from history, nature,
geography, the elements, voyages, portraits and the four
seasons. He writes in a fine English tradition worthy
of serious literary review and critique. Here are samples:
"I took the preacher's text
too much for Gospel truth:
"In the light of your eyes, rejoice and have your wish!"

or

"In the verse coming next he serves another dish;
What are childhood and youth but vanity and vice?"

How about a quotation from the poem "Autumn"!

"Shaking , I listen for the word to fall;
building a scaffold makes no deafer sound.
Each heartbeat knocks my body to the ground,
like a slow battering ram crumbling a wall."

Lowell's poetry is both informative and relaxing. It is recommended for general reading or as collegiate literary
critique. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Poetry, published by Modern Poetry Association on October 1, 2004. The length of the article is 5934 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Third Hour of the Night.(Poem)(Illustration)
Author: Frank Bidart
Publication: Poetry (Refereed)
Date: October 1, 2004
Publisher: Modern Poetry Association
Volume: 185Issue: 1Page: 1(36)

Article Type: Illustration, Poem

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