Star Dust

Frank Bidart

I've just wandered through the already-posted Amazon reviews on this one, and it's pretty obvious that I'm in the minority. So I'll apologize beforehand, since it's obvious I'm wrong. After all, this collection was, in fact, a National Book Award finalist, though it lost to Merwin's Migration. Despite the overwhelming evidence that I am, in fact, wrong, I have to stick to my guns-- I just didn't like it anywhere near as much as everyone else seems to have.

First off, "The Third Hour of the Night" has to be addressed. The dramatic monologue, as a poetic device, has a long and revered history, as well it should. But the vast majority of dramatic monologues throughout the ages have been presented to us in formal verse, which allows for a freer language, because poetically it still has the form to fall back on; it's still unquestionably poetry. Doing dramatic monologues in free verse is exceptionally tricky; if you fall back into unpoetic language, you risk the entire house of cards toppling down around you, with your monologue looking like a speech that's been chopped up into little lines. It's worse when you're relating history. He central part of "The Third Hour of the Night," which takes up about a quarter of Star Dust's total length, tells us about Benvenuto Cellini. It's certainly not straight biographical information, but it still borders on the prosaic, and crosses over that line far too many times during its length. I know there's a lot of argument over this point, but to me, if it's too prosaic too many times, I simply can't look at it seriously as poetry.

Bookending the tome with "The Third Hour of the Night" is the chapbook Music Like Dirt, which focuses on the desire to create-- the primal, inborn desire. It would be easy to make cracks here about the primal urge needing some revision before it gets thrown to the wolves, but let's face it-- "The Third Hour of the Night" took up a whole issue of Poetry magazine in 2004. An entire issue. They've never done that before. Ever. And Poetry is the pinnacle. Whither goeth Poetry goeth a nation. Certainly whither goeth Poetry goeth the National Book Association.

But I still can't find a reason to consider it better than average. It's not worse than average, certainly, given how much less accomplished prosaic nonsense finds its way into magazines and webzines on a monthly basis, but it's not better, either.