Against Silence: Poems - Hardcover

Bidart, Frank

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374603510 ISBN 13: 9780374603519

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Synopsis

An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and “one of the undisputed master poets of our time” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR)

Words, voices reek of the worlds from which they
emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable
aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise.

Words―there is a gap, nonetheless always
and forever, between words and the world―

slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish.
•
Set up a situation,―
. . . then reveal an abyss.

For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eleventh collection of poetry, Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and old cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls reality forth―with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.

About this title

About the Author

Frank Bidart is the author of a dozen collections of poetry, including Metaphysical Dog, Watching the Spring Festival, Star Dust, Desire, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965–1990. He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His book Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the 2017 National Book Award. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374603510
• ISBN 13: 9780374603519
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 80