Metaphysical Dog: Poems

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 poets 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.