Metaphysical Dog Poems - Hardcover

Praise for Metaphysical Dog. At seventy-three years old, Bidart has a light, mellifluous voice that could lend succor to the shell shocked. Exceedingly generous and gentle, he also wields a supercharged intelligence, a tentacled erudition that reaches deep into what Matthew Arnold dubbed the best that is known and thought in the world . . . Metaphysical Dog . . . [is] his most intimate testimonial of the poetic mind in reciprocity with the personal man.--William Giraldi, Poets & Writers. My favourite book of the spring--and likely of many springs to come--is Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart, our great poet of rage--rage at the self, rage at the world--and acceptance. This collection engages his entire body of work, echoing the lyric fluency of his incomparable 2008 collection Watching the Spring Festival, assessing his legendary long poem Ellen West, from 1977's The Book of the Body, and even harking back to the visionary terrain of his debut, Golden State. Metaphysical Dog is a book of devastating beauty and genuine terror--an unrelenting inquiry into some of the darkest corners of existence. No writer means as much to me as Frank Bidart, and I'm conscious of the inadequacy of this attempt to describe his work. But how do you write about unspeakable eloquence? How can you explain art that has taught you how to live? --Jared Bland, The Globe and Mail. At seventy-two, the future is what I mourn, Bidart announces in this starkly inspiring eighth collection. The poet's spiky free reverse remains direct, sometimes even frightening, and clearer than ever before about mortality--his own death, and the deaths of his friends and his parents; and yet, perhaps in the spirit of anticipatory mourning, familiar interests--in old and new movies, terse metaphysical argument, and sex, especially sex between men are all present. 'The true language of ecstasy is the forbidden language of the mystics, he says in Defrocked --Various

Frank Bidart's most recent full-length collections of poetry are Watching the Spring Festival (FSG, 2008), Star Dust (FSG, 2005), Desire (FSG, 1997), and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (FSG, 1990). He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, and, most recently, the 2007 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. He teaches at Wellesley College.