Hilton Als Reviews New Frank Bidart Collected

At the New Yorker, Hilton Als serves as an informative (and generous) guide through Frank Bidart's recently published Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux). "No matter how you slice it," Als begins, "gay children with straight parents are born to people who are not their type." From there: 

Growing up in a milieu that doesn’t reflect their desires, queer kids can’t help questioning their difference and what it means, in relation to Mom and Dad’s more socially acceptable union—even if that marriage happens to fail. (“Always that same old story— / Father Time and Mother Earth, / A marriage on the rocks,” James Merrill wrote, in “The Broken Home.”) Standing both inside and outside the parental home, or their fantasies of it, gay and lesbian poets, such as Elizabeth Bishop, Audre Lorde, Ronaldo V. Wilson, and Frank Bidart, can become astute sociologists of the ways in which people respond to gay difference and to difference in general.

Writers, for the most part, put into words what they see and hear in the world, and what Bidart saw, heard, and absorbed as a boy growing up in California during the Second World War is one of the tales that he tells vividly, gruesomely, and beautifully, in his important new collection, “Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016” (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux). 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.

Read on at the New Yorker.