Syndetics cover image
Image from Syndetics

Metaphysical dog / Frank Bidart.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013Edition: First editionDescription: 113 pages ; 22 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0374173613 (alk. paper)
  • 9780374173616 (alk. paper)
Uniform titles:
  • Poems. Selections
Contents:
Metaphysical dog -- Writing "Ellen West" -- Like -- Those nights -- Name the bed -- Queer -- History -- Hunger for the absolute -- Defrocked -- He is Ava Gardner -- Mourn -- The enterprise is abandoned -- Janáček at seventy -- Threnody on the death of Harriet Smithson -- Dream of the book -- Inauguration day -- Race -- Glutton -- Whitman -- Three tattoos -- As you crave soul -- Things falling from great heights -- O ruin o haunted -- Plea and chastisement -- Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall -- Late Fairbanks -- Against rage -- For the AIDS dead -- Tyrant -- Mouth -- Rio -- Presage -- Elegy for earth -- Of his bones are coral made -- Poem ending with a sentence by Heath Ledger -- Dream reveals in neon the great addictions -- Ganymede -- On this earth where no secure foothold is -- For an unwritten opera.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 811.54 B584 Available 33111007143957
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
A National Book Award Finalist

Metaphysical Dog offers a vital, searching collection from one of finest American poets at work today

In "Those Nights," Frank Bidart writes: "We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not." Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog , Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet's most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours.

Near the end of the book, Bidart writes:

In adolescence, you thought your work
ancient work: to decipher at last

human beings' relation to God. Decipher

love. To make what was once whole
whole again: or to see

why it never should have been thought whole.

This "ancient work" reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the "hunger for the Absolute"--a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled "History is a series of failed revelations."

The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.

One of Publishers Weekly 's Best Poetry Books
A New York Times Notable Book
An NPR Best Book of the Year

Poems.

Includes bibliographical references.

Metaphysical dog -- Writing "Ellen West" -- Like -- Those nights -- Name the bed -- Queer -- History -- Hunger for the absolute -- Defrocked -- He is Ava Gardner -- Mourn -- The enterprise is abandoned -- Janáček at seventy -- Threnody on the death of Harriet Smithson -- Dream of the book -- Inauguration day -- Race -- Glutton -- Whitman -- Three tattoos -- As you crave soul -- Things falling from great heights -- O ruin o haunted -- Plea and chastisement -- Martha Yarnoz Bidart Hall -- Late Fairbanks -- Against rage -- For the AIDS dead -- Tyrant -- Mouth -- Rio -- Presage -- Elegy for earth -- Of his bones are coral made -- Poem ending with a sentence by Heath Ledger -- Dream reveals in neon the great addictions -- Ganymede -- On this earth where no secure foothold is -- For an unwritten opera.

Powered by Koha