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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 extends 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.

"...Bidart's main achievement is to have developed a style--erratic, unstable, the sound of the speaking voice as it cracks--that can accommodate his wild narrators....Bidart identifies with the deep, violent struggle of his narrators, and tries to make his readers identify with it, too. To a considerable extent, he succeeds."

Adam Kirsch, New Republic, 10/27/1997

"It is, in a sense, the worst case that could be made against desire: Sex makes people miserable; it leads them to destroy others and themselves. Yet Bidart converts his poem into an affirmation of embodied love....That it is a gay man who has created this book, many years into the age of AIDS, makes the balm a little more bitter, a little more sweet."

Langdon Hammer, Nation, 11/24/1997

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