Desire

In Frank Bidart's new 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: its range is as wide as its unifying theme is specific. Here are lyrics of heartbreaking directness and candor, poems that contemplate the art of writing as well as Eros, and (in a spectacular narrative based on Tacitus) the desolation and mirror of history. 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.