ABSTRACT

Frank Bidart's poems have the density of a tragic drama, a phil-osophical meditation, or a Faulknerian novel. They show us interior landscapes of failure and horror, crime and guilt, desire and regret, blindness and blankness. Telling of failed love and artistic struggle-and of the inability of our culture, our cosmology, to sustain and to support-Bidart has produced some of the most powerful and profound poems of the postmodern era.