That crazy drunken night Imaneuvered you out into a field outside ofCoachella—I’d never seen a skyso full of stars, as if the dirt of our livesstill were sprinkled with glisteningwhite shells from the ancient seabedbeneath us that receded long ago.Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.—That suffocated, fearfullook on your face.Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phonetell me you died almost nine months ago.Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitterthat we cannot ever havethe conversation that innature and alive we never had. Now not ever.We have not spoken in years. I thoughtperhaps at ninety or a hundred, twobroken-down old men, we wouldn’tgive a damn, and find speech.When I tell you that all the years we wereundergraduates I was madly in love with youyou say youknew. I say I knew youknew. You sayThere was no place in nature we could meet.You say this as if you need me toadmit something. No placein nature, given our natures. Or is thiswarning? I say what is happening now ishappening only because one of us isdead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!Our wordswill be weirdly jolly.That light I now envyexists only on this page.
Feature Date
- July 15, 2024
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- What Sparks Poetry
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“Half-Light” from HALF-LIGHT: COLLECTED POEMS 1965-2016 by Frank Bidart.
Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 2017 by Frank Bidart
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Frank Bidart is the author of a dozen 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.
"[Half-light] comprises fifty years' worth of daring, revelatory poems. For me, it's the book not just of the year but of the decade."
—Garth Greenwell, Bookforum
"[Frank Bidart's] poetry over five decades has volubly modeled a wholly new approach to autobiographical material, chiefly by giving voice to the inner travails of other people's lives, both real and imagined . . . The publication of Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 gives readers a chance to see how Bidart, ill content merely to 'say what happened' in prefab stanzas, performs a poetry of 'embodiment' . . . Throughout his career, Bidart's self-devoting genius has been his ability to transform a poem into a vocalized (albeit anguished) performance of consciousness and moral interrogation, an occasion for metaphysical speculation as intense and oracular as any Shakespearean monologue or philosophical treatise . . . Sublime . . . Mesmerizing . . . ."
—Major Jackson, The New York Times Book Review
"Made up of the seventy-eight-year-old author’s eight previous volumes of verse and a new sequence—the bold and elegiac Thirst—Half-light is both the culmination of a distinguished career and a poetic ur-text about how homophobia, doubt, and a parent’s confusing love can shape a gay child . . . The collection is a fraught song of the self, composed of subtleties and exclamations . . . True emotion demands a dialogue, and, like James Merrill’s extraordinary work The Changing Light at Sandover, Bidart’s poems are a kind of séance, one in which he tries to invoke and communicate love, even if that love can no longer be achieved, tasted, seen, touched."
—Hilton Als, The New Yorker
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