Poet of the Incommensurate
Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016
by Frank Bidart.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017, $40.00 cloth.
IT WOULD be easy to call Frank Bidart—who has spent much of his writing life taking on the voices of others, essentially reinventing the dramatic monologue as a thing of formal daring and moral urgency—a poet of great empathy. But when that word appears for the first time in his work, it appears in quotes:
Now that she is dead (that her BODY is DEAD),
I’m capable of an “empathy,”
an “acceptance” of the inevitable (in her, and in myself)
that I denied her, living…
“ ‘Empathy’ ”: this hardly gets at the self-dividedness that governs even, or especially, our fiercest acts of solicitude. Another poem tells us what necessarily replaces the banality of empathy, when we are willing to look at ourselves as ruthlessly, and able to feel as nakedly, as the poet does. This is Bidart in the voice of Berlioz mourning his wife (these words are set off in quotes and ascribed to the composer’s autobiography, but you won’t find them there):
I will not attempt to
