Against Silence

An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and "one of the undisputed master poets of our time" (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR)

Words, voices reek of the worlds from which they
emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable
aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise.

Words-there is a gap, nonetheless always
and forever, between words and the world-

slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish.
.
Set up a situation,-
. . . then reveal an abyss.

For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner's eleventh collection of poetry, Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and old cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls reality forth-with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.

Part One
Why the Dead Cannot Answer
At the Shore
Mourning What We Thought We Were
Words Reek Worlds
The Moral Arc of the Universe Bends Toward Justice
Behind the Lion
The Fifth Hour of the Night

Part Two
The Ghost
Poem with a Refrain from LeRoy Chatfield
The Great, the One Subject
Poem Beginning with Words by Lisel Mueller
Coda
On My Seventy-Eighth

Acknowledgments