Against Silence: Poems

By Frank Bidart

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374603526

Frank Bidart

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.

Book preview

PART ONE

Why the Dead Cannot Answer

A light, just now living, that has

never been, in its mortal life, turned off—

ON, it has never been, in its mortal

life, not ON,—

… when you ask what it is like

suddenly for what was always there

not to be there

for what had to be endured by those before you

to have to be endured now by you

LIKE, what in the world are such pervasive

vanishings LIKE,—

… no words it knows apply, and it is silent.

Silent. This is the eternal silence of the dead.

At the Shore

All over the earth,

elegies for the earth.

The shore is in mourning. It mourns what it must soon

see, the