Washington Post Reviews New Bidart, Salter, Bang

Elizabeth Lund reviews new collections of poetry by Frank Bidart, Mary Jo Salter, and Mary Jo Bang this week at the Washington Post. Lund writes that while a new compendium of Bidart's collected poetry "highlights the poet’s enduring themes and concerns," Bang "bends and tosses ideas as easily as one would a Wurfpuppe, a flexible doll," in her latest collection, A Doll for Throwing. Let's start at the beginning with Lund's assessment of the Bidart:
Frank Bidart has long challenged readers — and convention — with a complexity and originality not often seen in American poetry. Now with Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (FSG), readers can gain a deeper understanding of how Bidart’s writing works together to create a vast, manifold narrative. The collection highlights the poet’s enduring themes and concerns, among them: desire and shame, the quest to find truth and freedom, and the duality of evilness and innocence. Bidart’s ability as a storyteller fuels many of these pieces, including his famous dramatic monologues about child murderer Herbert White, an anorexic woman named Ellen West and other unsettling figures. The speaker also looks unflinchingly at his own life and at the people who have shaped his perceptions, from his stifling mother and alcoholic father to the men he has loved and lost. Bidart’s signature collection, Metaphysical Dog (2013), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, has even more resonance here because readers can see all that led up to those poems, including “Queer,” where the speaker explains, “If I had managed to come out to my/ mother, she would have blamed not/ me, but herself./ The door through which you were shoved out/into the light/ was self-loathing and terror.” The book closes with an ambitious section of new writing that deals with mortality and remembered friendships, a fitting way to end this monumental work.
Read her thoughts on Salter and Bang at the Washington Post.