FROM 2013, AND his best yet, I think, which makes it all the more frustrating that I cannot get Bidart's most recent poems in book form unless I pony tip for the new collected poems and (in effect) re-purchase some six or seven books I already own. Which I would rather not do, even in the car elf a poet I admire.
Back in the day, I got annoyed at bands who included on a "greatest hits" album a track or two that had never before appeared on an album, thus gouging their most loyal fans.
(For example, the Rolling Stones' Through the Past Darkly was, when it appeared, the only album on which one would find "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Honky Tonk Women," which were obviously must-haves, but to have them you had to buy "Let's Spend the Nigh Together" and "Ruby Tuesday" for the third time, if you had already purchased [as I had] Between the Buttons and Flowers.)
(Or Dylan. The only way you could get "Positively 4th Street" was to buy the first greatest hits, but of course you already had all the other hits.)
I could check the new Bidart collected poems out from the library, I suppose. Itch scratched. But I would rather support the poets I'm interested in by an actual purchase. It's just that...
...well, rant rant rant. Sigh.
"Writing 'Ellen West'" is like a 21st century "Circus Animals' Desertion," and the whole volume has a late-Yeats aura for me, the shedding of disguises, the directness, the relative spareness without sacrificing lyrical essence, the honesty, the owning-up. Harriet Smithson is back, and we also have a poem on Obama's first inauguration that still works and a poem ("Queer") that should go up on a wall in every counselor's office in every middle and high school in the United States right now.
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