Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016
by Frank Bidart
Summary
This collected volume gathers Frank Bidart's work across five decades, from 1965 to 2016, into a single career spanning book that lets a reader trace how his voice driven poems on desire, guilt, art, and the violence of inner life developed over an entire working life rather than within any single earlier collection. It includes the dramatic monologues that first brought Bidart wide attention, among them "Ellen West," which enters the mind of a woman consumed by an eating disorder, and "Herbert White," spoken in the voice of a psychopath, poems that established Bidart's willingness to inhabit disturbing consciousness from the inside rather than describing it from a safe remove.
Bidart uses unusual capitalization and typography throughout to score how a voice actually sounds when it speaks or thinks, so that emphasis, hesitation, and rising pitch appear on the page as visual as well as verbal information. Read across the full collected span, that technique reveals itself as a lifelong investigation into how obsession, confession, and inheritance construct a self, the same questions returning in different guises from Bidart's earliest monologues through his later, more explicitly autobiographical work.
Reading this retrospective volume means moving through an entire career at once, watching a poet's central preoccupations sharpen and deepen rather than change direction. It suits a reader who wants to see how a single, unusual formal method, built on the page's visual layout as much as its language, can carry a lifetime of the same difficult questions about desire and the self.
Historical Context & Significance
This retrospective volume won the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; that year's Pulitzer finalists were Evie Shockley's semiautomatic and Patricia Smith's Incendiary Art. The pairing of two major American poetry prizes in successive years marked a late career culmination for work Bidart had been publishing since the 1970s.
Bidart discovered poetry at UC Riverside before pursuing graduate study at Harvard, where he became a student and friend of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He has taught at Wellesley College since 1972, and his individual collections had already been decorated before this volume, including the 2007 Bollingen Prize and the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Metaphysical Dog; an earlier book, Desire, had been a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in 1997, so this collected volume closed a long gap between near misses and a final, cumulative win.