Jacket Image



Metaphysical Dog: Poems

Frank Bidart

List price £9.99
Product Details
Format:
Paperback
ISBN:
9780374534622
Published:
01 Jun 2014
Publisher:
Macmillan
Dimensions:
128 pages - 210 x 140 x 15mm

In “Those Nights,” Frank Bidart writes: “We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not.” Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet’s most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours.
     Near the end of the book, Bidart writes:

     In adolescence, you thought your work
     ancient work: to decipher at last

      human beings’ relation to God. Decipher

     love. To make what was once whole
     whole again: or to see

     why it never should have been thought whole.


     This “ancient work” reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the “hunger for the Absolute”—a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled “History is a series of failed revelations.”
     The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.

Metaphysical Dog (Hardback) 9780374173616, Book of the Body 9780374115494

A finalist for the National Book Award.  A vital, searching new collection from one of the finest American poets at work today

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