RaveHarvard ReviewIn Bidart’s newest collection, Against Silence, the history of the spirit is as much the individual story of the self, as seen in particular landscapes, as it is a larger story of general demise. This new book is elegiac, lamenting the poet’s old age, America, and the dying natural world ... [A] temperate voice recurs throughout Bidart’s work. Usually it’s in dialogue with the poet’s past, specifically the landscapes of Bakersfield and the Mojave Desert. That dialogue continues in the present collection, in Bidart’s unique style: words are capitalized for emphasis and italicized for sotto voce and digressions; punctuation is individualized and sometimes weaponized. Some readers have found this aspect of his poetry distracting ... Bidart has gradually become less dependent on this technique; the longer poems or sequences in Against Silence pose few such typographic or punctuational challenges ... Bidart, like all strong poets, is continually reinventing and rediscovering himself; even at the brink of dissolution he refuses to be silent.
Louise Glück
RaveHarvard ReviewMost of the poems in this new collection mull over emotional failures—not just the lack of desire or passion, but of basic human connections ... The struggle to connect but also to create, to tell a fable or an enlightening story, baffles the personae of these poems. This might seem like a negative poetics, but it enables the poet to link the creative self with the feeling self in a way that sidesteps problems of personality and to delve deeply into the muddle of perceptions and sensations from which poetry emerges ... Aside from the complex emotional tenor of these poems, what makes them so readable is the narration—image succeeding image in a convincing flow of perception—and Glück’s agile free verse. It is easy to underestimate the difficulty of writing free verse. These poems offer a succession of short lines, long and short lines mingled, long line succeeding long line, unfolding with the inevitability that characterizes all good verse, metrical or free ... Casual yet perfect, conversational yet inevitable, the verse fully formed yet informal, Glück at her best—and she often is at her best—is a master of lyric narrative. Although brief, this new collection offers some of her best work ... Everyone seriously interested in poetry will be reading these for years to come.
