Desire - by Frank Bidart (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Desire is a 1997 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Review Quotes

"[Desire] is insightful, disturbing, complex, personal, painstaking, and driven. Almost no poet since Robert Lowell . . . has written verse that so successfully exemplifies these qualities." --Stephen Burt, The New Leader

"Cementing his reputation as a poet of astonishing originality, Bidart revisits classical encounters--the aftermath of a battle described by Tacitus, an incestuous romance in Ovid--and fashions them into a poetic idiom uniquely his own." --David Lehman, People

About the Author

Frank Bidart's poems are collected in In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990). In 1998 he won the Bobbitt Prize and received a Lannan Literary Fellowship. He teaches at Wellesley College.