Metaphysical Dog

Title: Metaphysical Dog
Author: Frank Bidart
ISBN: 9780374534622
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: First Edition
Number of Pages: 128
Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description:

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
A National Book Award Finalist

Metaphysical Dog offers a vital, searching collection from one of finest American poets at work today

In "Those Nights," Frank Bidart writes: "We who could get / somewhere through / words through / sex could not." Words and sex, art and flesh: In Metaphysical Dog, Bidart explores their nexus. The result stands among this deeply adventurous poet's most powerful and achieved work, an emotionally naked, fearlessly candid journey through many of the central axes, the central conflicts, of his life, and ours.

Near the end of the book, Bidart writes:

In adolescence, you thought your work
ancient work: to decipher at last

human beings' relation to God. Decipher

love. To make what was once whole
whole again: or to see

why it never should have been thought whole.

This "ancient work" reflects what the poet sees as fundamental in human feeling, what psychologists and mystics have called the "hunger for the Absolute"--a hunger as fundamental as any physical hunger. This hunger must confront the elusiveness of the Absolute, our self-deluding, failed glimpses of it. The third section of the book is titled "History is a series of failed revelations."

The result is one of the most fascinating and ambitious books of poetry in many years.

One of Publishers Weekly's Best Poetry Books
A New York Times Notable Book
An NPR Best Book of the Year