POETRY IN REVIEW

1 7 8 Y P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W C H R I S T O P H E R S P A I D E ‘‘It is terribly hard,’’ Elizabeth Bishop confessed to Robert Lowell, in a letter dated 10 April 1972. She had become ‘‘very good friends’’ with the poet Frank Bidart, a generation her junior. Born in Bakersfield, California, Bidart had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts , to study literature at Harvard; while still a graduate student, he became Lowell’s friend, first reader, and reviser-atarms – ‘‘both amanuensis and sounding board,’’ as Bidart later put it, for the poetry of Lowell’s last years. Now Bidart was set to publish a book of his own, eight years in the making, about everything he hoped to escape by moving east: Bakersfield, the West, his family, his past. Bidart had asked the two senior poets for publicity blurbs; Bishop was struggling to find the right phrases. ‘‘His poem,’’ her letter continued, ‘‘is so personal, so conclusive – so definitive, almost (for Frank). I don’t see where he can go after that, really. I wish he’d try something easier. He has such amazing taste and sensitivity about other people’s poetry. I wish he were a happier young man.’’ H a l f - l i g h t : C o l l e c t e d P o e m s , 1 9 6 5 – 2 0 1 6 , by Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 736 pp., $40) 1 7 9 R That seemingly definitive debut, Golden State (1973), the seven books that followed, a collection of ten new poems titled Thirst, and several interviews have been published together as Half-light: Collected Poems, 1965–2016, recently named the winner of 2017’s National Book Award for poetry. Half-light chronicles a halfcentury of refusals – in collection after collection, poem after poem – to try something easier; even if Bidart wanted to, he wouldn’t know how. Happiness (the poems convincingly show, resignedly) is out of his hands, and certainly not the point of the poems, which force their way out of Bidart, spurred on by primal drives, a compulsion as involuntary as breath or pulse. Accepting his recent award, Bidart a≈rmed, ‘‘Writing the poems was how I survived.’’ The poems make you believe it: you can rarely read more than a page of Half-light before coming upon the same elemental lexicon, tokens of all or nothing, life or death: absolute, being, body, desire, existence, flesh, hunger, necessity, self, voice. Bidart, you could argue, is one of our great poet-critics; admittedly , the main poet he critiques is himself, and he’s not much of a fan. In an essayistic aside – part retrospect, part self-accusation, part lecture on genre theory 101 – midway through the collection Watching the Spring Festival (2008), Bidart finally classifies his poems. As so often in the late poetry, he addresses himself as ‘‘you,’’ a pronoun seethed through gritted teeth: ‘‘You have spent your life writing tragedies for a world that does not believe in tragedy. What is tragedy? Everyone is born somewhere: into this body, this family, this place. Into the mystery of your own predilections that change as you become conscious of what governs choice, but change little. Into, in short, particularity inseparable from existence .’’ He continues: ‘‘The radical given’’ – the body you are forced into, the desires you are arbitrarily dealt, the families and histories you are stuck inside – ‘‘cannot be evaded or erased. No act of intelligence or prowess or cunning or goodwill can reconcile the patrimony of the earth.’’ Bidart’s tragicomic portrait of our condition (a thousand parts tragic to one part comic) gave his next collection its title: the human animal is a ‘‘metaphysical dog’’ (2013). Real dogs, physical dogs, find their bodies harassed by their own urges, crates and leashes, humans’ harsh domestications and inexplicable behaviors: we metaphysical dogs encounter harassments in both body and spirit, in existence altogether. ‘‘How dare 1 8 0 S P A I D E Y being / give him this body,’’ Bidart asks of his family...