Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Watching the Spring Festival

Watching the Spring Festival

Bidart, Frank

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $15.00

ISBN10: 0374531722
ISBN13: 9780374531720
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Mar 31 2009
Pages: 72
Weight: 0.22
Height: 0.22 Width: 5.46 Depth: 8.30
Language: English

This is Frank Bidart's first book of lyrics--his first book not dominated by long poems. Narrative elaboration becomes speed and song. Less embattled than earlier work, less actively violent, these new poems have, by conceding time's finalities and triumphs, acquired a dark radiance unlike anything seen before in Bidart's long career.

Mortality--imminent, not theoretical--forces the self to question the relation between the actual life lived and what was once the promise of transformation. This plays out against a broad landscape. The book opens with Marilyn Monroe, followed by the glamour of the eighth-century Chinese imperial court (seen through the eyes of one of China's greatest poets, Tu Fu). At the center of the book is an ambitious meditation on the Russian ballerina Ulanova, Giselle, and the nature of tragedy. All this gives new dimension and poignance to Bidart's recurring preoccupation with the human need to leave behind some record or emblem, a made thing that stands, in the face of death, for the possibilities of art.

Bidart, winner of the 2007 Bollingen Prize in American Poetry, is widely acknowledged as one of the significant poets of his time. This is perhaps his most accessible, mysterious, and austerely beautiful book.

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