Against Silence
Poems
Published on 2. November 2021
Book
Hardback
80 pages
978-0-374-60351-9 (ISBN)
Description
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, images reek of the worlds from which they
emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable
aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise.
Words-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, he urges others to join the chorus. 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 cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls forth-with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.
Words, images reek of the worlds from which they
emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable
aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise.
Words-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, he urges others to join the chorus. 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 cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls forth-with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Dimensions
Height: 217 mm
Width: 144 mm
Thickness: 14 mm
Weight
226 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-374-60351-9 (9780374603519)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Frank Bidart is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Metaphysical Dog, Watching the Spring Festival, Star Dust, Desire, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90. He has won many prizes, including the Wallace Stevens Award, the Bollingen Prize for American 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.