Bidart, an 83 year old neighbor of ours in Cambridge, is a much honored poet having garnered the Pulitzer, National Book Critics Circle, and National Book Awards as well as the Bollingen Prize from Yale.

In this, his eleventh collection of poetry, he returns to themes of family (especially his parents) and childhood, death and loss, and homoerotic love.  Finishing this book in one sitting, I immediately re-read it, savoring the language and insights Bedard brings to his work honed over 50 years.  Referring, often tangentially and indirectly, to sources as varied as Yeats, jazz greats Billy Holiday and Sidney Bechet, and even Judy Garland’s ‘A Star is Born’, he uses all capital letters to highlight words and ideas such as LIKE, BLIND, SPIRIT, IDEA, and CHAOS.

He often addresses poetry itself as in his poem ‘Words Reek Worlds’ in which he writes “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.”  And later in that same poem, “As  you arm yourself, as you go out among the tribe of makers in/words—arm yourself with phrases, /Set up a situation—then reveal an abyss./ Duende/ Sprung Rhythm./   Or (my favorite paraphrased from Yeats):  Out of our argument with others we make/ rhetoric, out of our argument with ourselves we make poetry—/ As I swagger out, armed (as I think) with/ the secret of representation, as I swagger out among the tribes/ I become aware that I am armed with a pebble against the ocean,/though/ I speak I am silent.”   Or in his poem ‘The Fifth Hour of the Night” in which he writes: “After centuries, at last my father’s only son, the maw more and more/ravenous/ within him, discovered that what he could/make (the mania somehow was to/make,/he discovered that he must make—-) was/ poetry. Dark anti-matter whose matter is/ words/ in which the seam and the crack (what Emerson/called the crack in everything God made) are in/fury/ fused, annealed, ONE.”

Bedard is eminently quotable, but I’ll finish with one last wonderful image that recalled the first line of Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’ from his poem ‘Coda’:  “When this body that we find ourselves in at birth at last dies,/and what we have hoped (hoped at/best—-) is past death to rejoin the vast silence that precedes birth”.

Cycles, the abyss, a poisoned childhood, poetry—Bidart takes it all on and in.  Perhaps I was most taken with his poem entitled ‘On my Seventy Eighth’, an occasion that looms slightly more than a year ahead for me.  If you find poetry comforting during times of difficulty and/or exhilarating during times of awe, wonder, and joy, read this book and find both.