Star Dust

Frank Bidart (hardcover, 84 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005; $20)

Desire, Frank Bidart’s fifth collection of poetry, appeared in 1997, dominated by the long poem, “The Second Hour of the Night.” At the end of the poem these lines appear, spare as the disappearing tail of a comet:

infinite the sounds the poems
seeking to be allowed to S U B M I T,—that this
dust become seed
like those extinguished stars whose fires still give us light.

Now, in Star Dust, Bidart’s latest collection, the cosmic “seeds” of that poem have become the genesis for the next, “The Third Hour of the Night.” In what has emerged as Bidart’s magnum opus, these poems take as their framework the Egyptian “Book of Gates,” a cosmological treatise describing the sun’s passage through the twelve territories, or hours, of the underworld before its rise again each dawn. Using the journey of this primal source as a guiding principle, Bidart weaves philosophy, mythology, personal narrative, historical monologue, and perhaps even necromancy into a radiant tapestry of sweep and grandeur. In a recent interview, Bidart articulates the epic nature of his project:

The “First Hour” is about the collapse of Western metaphysics, the attempt to make a single conceptual system that orders the crucial intellectual issues and dilemmas in our lives . . . The “Second Hour” is about Eros, how the “givenness” of Eros in our lives embodies the givenness of fate. The “Third Hour,” which ends my new book, is about making, how “Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.” Making in the poem, and the book as a whole, proceeds from the twins within us, the impulse to create as well as not-to-create, to obliterate the world of manifestation, to destroy.

Bidart goes on to say that while he envisions a full twelve “hours” of the work, ultimately he knows this ideal is impossible. Perhaps the impossibility of the project is what drives him—with what now seems an increasing sense of urgency—to make what he knows he can never make. In his own version of negative capability, Bidart’s genius lies not only in what he has made, but also in what remains unmade, in the “temple of delight” of his inexhaustible and incandescent imagination.

In his richly self-reflexive style, at the end of “The Third Hour of the Night,” Bidart asks and then answers the collection’s central question and thesis: “After sex & metaphysics,— / . . . what? / What you have made.” Throughout Star Dust, and indeed throughout Bidart’s work as a whole, the human “impulse to create as well as not-to-create” drives the poet to reflect on making and unmaking through multiple, shifting perspectives. In “Curse,” for example, Bidart enters the psyche of the perpetrators of 9/11, while upholding Shelley’s claim that “the great secret of morals is love.” In his notes to the poem, Bidart emphasizes that “by love he [Shelley] means not affection or erotic feeling, but sympathetic identification.” Yet here, the “sympathetic identification” becomes imprecation: the poet would visit the horrors of the act upon the perpetrators.

May what you have made descend upon you.
May the listening ears of your victims     their eyes     their

breath

enter you, and eat like acid
the bubble of rectitude that allowed you breath.

May their breath now, in eternity, be your breath.

By the end of the poem, even the poet himself is implicated, as the cycle of sympathetic identification spirals back on him and his impulse to create: “Out of the great secret of morals, the imagination to enter / the skin of another, what I have made is a curse.”

Early in “The Third Hour of the Night,” this duality is further explored, as Bidart addresses himself through the disembodied voice of the “other.” Here, “the twins within us, the impulse to create as well as not-to-create,” foreshadow the violence that darkens the end of the poem:

Understand that when the beast within you
succeeds again in paralyzing into unending

incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make

its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its

rectitude. It knows that it alone
knows you.

As the poem progresses into its long second section—an extended monologue in the voice of Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance sculptor and contemporary of Michelangelo—Bidart grapples with the “equilibrium of ferocious, contradictory / forces” that compel the artist to create. In a swiftly moving narrative, Cellini describes the completion of his masterpiece, the bronze statue of Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa. Yet, like that of all art, its creation is laden with strife: while he engages in a battle of wills with his patron, Cellini is forced to avenge the murder of his brother. Born of destruction, his statue then becomes a reflection of the primal forces that engendered it.

By the poem’s terrifying final section, Bidart must rely once more on his own preternatural powers, as the voice of Cellini morphs into that of an aboriginal Australian sorcerer. With a chilling directness and evenness of tone, the speaker describes how he raped a woman with “the killing stick” and “touched her heart,” until “the spirit that belonged to that dead woman” left her and entered him. The speaker goes on to describe the woman’s miraculous resurrection and his prediction of her death within two days. Like the three Fates whose threads are spun in the poem’s second section, the shaman possesses a godlike power, though he understands that power is limited:

Even the gods cannot
end death. In the universe anybody can kill anybody

with a stick. What the gods gave me

is their gift, the power to bury within each
creature the hour it ceases.

While the grandeur and ambition of Bidart’s project is unquestionable, “The Third Hour of the Night” remains a flawed poem, perhaps even more so than its precursors. Whereas in “The Second Hour,” Bidart manages to maintain a dramatic tension throughout his retelling of the myth of Myrrha and Cinyras from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in “The Third Hour,” Cellini’s account often feels propelled more by direct action than by genuine narrative urgency. In addition, the metamorphosis that occurs between the second and third sections of the poem feels like something of a leap, both logically and stylistically. In some ways, “The Third Hour of the Night” undermines itself as a long poem by exploiting Bidart’s great strength—the fugue-like solemnity and reverberations of his shorter lyrics.

No wonder, then, that the poems that make up “Music Like Dirt”— originally a chapbook by the same title and now the opening section of Star Dust—were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In both these and in Star Dust’s other shorter poems, Bidart reminds us that poetry’s purpose is not to heal, console or praise, but to mirror what is inside us, “What you ignore or refuse / or cannot bear.” While Bidart holds fast to the idiosyncratic typography and syntax of his earlier work, the poems in Star Dust have evolved out of the realm of the confessional and into the universal, the universally personal. In “The Soldier That Guards the Frontier,” Bidart draws on the Gospel of St. Thomas to articulate his own theory of making:

. . . Love
is heroic risk, for what you are impelled
to risk but do not

kills you; as does, of course this voice
knows, risk.

Ultimately, the knowledge that risk is both redemption and damnation is what makes Bidart a tragic poet. Time and again, he pushes his work beyond the border of risk, almost to the point of annihilation. In the constellation of contemporary American poetry, Bidart’s voice remains the black hole at the center of the galaxy. With unmatched gravity, he continues to entrance and disquiet:

In your stray moments, as now in
mine, may what was not

rise like grief before you.

 

Reviewed by Elizabeth Knapp

Elizabeth Knapp is a second-year doctoral candidate in poetry at Western Michigan University and the assistant to the director of the creative writing program.