Against Silence

by Frank Bidart

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374603519
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/02/2021
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	1,114,927
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Frank Bidart is the author of many 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.

Table of Contents

Part 1

Why the Dead Cannot Answer 3

At the Shore 4

Mourning What We Thought We Were 7

Words Reek Worlds 10

The Moral Arc of the Universe Bends Toward Justice 17

Behind the Lion 19

The Fifth Hour of the Night 22

Part 2

The Ghost 39

Poem with a Refrain from LeRoy Chatfield 41

The Great, the One Subject 43

Poem Beginning With Words by Lisel Mueller 49

Dialogue With Flesh 53

Coda 55

On My Seventy-Eighth 59

Acknowledgments 63

Editorial Reviews

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe and NPR

"Frank Bidart is a gift—we are lucky to have had him writing poetry for a half century. Against Silence is his eleventh collection, and continues his lifelong navigation of the uncertain spaces between haunting and love, and the fertile gap between words and the world." —Jonny Diamond, Lit Hub

“Against Silence is a bold, often painful exploration of regret and mortality . . . When I interviewed Bidart in 2015 for Life of a Poet, he said, 'There is a kind of beast within us that wants to destroy us, and I think people who manage to do what they set out to do have overcome some very profound impulse toward self-destruction.' Few poets have managed to do as much as Bidart." —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"In Against Silence, [Bidart] seems interested in individual and collective ethics, and sees a threat in silence — both the kind that opposes speech in life and the kind found in death, which we’re all up against. His poems float and swerve, at once cinematic and oddly intimate . . . His poems recognize, and help us recognize, the inherent harm in what we hold dear, defend and even worship." —Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review

"Bidart, like all strong poets, is continually reinventing and rediscovering himself; even at the brink of dissolution he refuses to be silent." —William Doreski, Harvard Review

"In Against Silence, as often in his oeuvre, Frank Bidart gives us a poetics where ethics and sensuality clash and a strange, terrifying awareness of what our species stands for is revealed." —Ilya Kaminsky, Poetry Daily

"Our greatest living poet of the flesh . . . The poet and reader keen to censor, ironize, or infantilize their own desires will find in the work of Frank Bidart a half-century-long rebuttal." —Nathan Blansett, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Another memorable contribution to Bidart's oeuvre." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

08/13/2021

Dylan Thomas famously wrote "Old age should burn and rave at close of day," advice expertly followed by Bidart, now 82, in this new (after the Pulitzer Prize—winning Half Light), smoldering collection of forthright lyric poems. In the book's longest poem, "The Fifth Hour of the Night," a bitter, unshakeable memory of childhood acquiescence in the face of a grandmother's racism ("I never forgave her for showing me/ me"), engenders not only deep feelings of anger, guilt, and regret, but a wider pessimism toward the human condition ("At the bottom of existence, contradictory necessary/ demands/ unsolvable, a dilemma") and the power of language to embody truth ("Words—there is a gap, nonetheless always/ and forever, between words and the world—"). VERDICT Though sometimes uncomfortable to read, Bidart's unleavened expressions of disillusionment, despair, and futility in the face of age ("the gnarled old hand / that one day you look down and see/ one day to see as yours") are acts of resistance against the inevitability of death. Their blunt force may escape younger poetry lovers but will resonate poignantly with older generations of readers.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

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