Desire

Poems

Frank Bidart

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

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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.

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Poet Frank Bidart reads from his poem "The Second Hour of the Ni

"Listen to this poetry reading to hear poet Frank Bidart read selections from his poem ""The Second Hour of the Night,"" which can be found in his book Desire, a 1997 National Book Award Finalist and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Learn more about the poetry collection Desire at http://us.macmillan.com/desire/FrankBidart Read about poet Frank Bidart at http://us.macmillan.com/author/frankbidart"

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Praise for Desire

"[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

Reviews from Goodreads

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Rui Carlos  rated it  
May 10, 2011
The book is mostly amazing for the poem, "The Second Hour of the Night" which is 33 pages of sheer brilliance. In the first 21 pages, there is a poem, "The Return" that foreshadows the level of aesthetic quality that approaches in the latter half of the book, but the poem "B ...more
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Kent  rated it  
May 11, 2010
The concept I see Bidart describing in this book is difficult to articulate, which is one the things that pulls me into the book. In some way, Bidart wants to show how desire can actually begin to feel like a concrete object, or a body, that is independent of our physical bodies. And this desire tak ...more
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Christina Marie  rated it  
Jan 6, 2012
The book was interesting and worth the wait. It was about all different kinds of desire in war, in lust, and I suppose love. It was poetic. It was mythological. It was a story not in prose but in something that played on the page. I read it in half an hour. It was short. ...more
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About the Author

Frank Bidart

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.

Frank Bidart

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Desire
Poems
Frank Bidart
Award

Boston Book Review - Winner, National Book Awards - Nominee, National Books Critics Circle Awards - Nominee, Lambda Literary Award - Nominee

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks
March 1999
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780374525996
ISBN10: 0374525994
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches, 84 pages
$12.00
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