This month for Poetry 365 we’re featuring the profound eighth book from influential poet Frank Bidart. In Metaphysical Dog, the Wallace Stevens Award winner focuses his “spiky free verse” on poignant explorations of “the war between the mind and body, ecstasy and obliteration, his mother’s death, and his coming out.” Unconventional, emotional, and intellectually rewarding, this 39 poem collection shows why Louise Gluck named Bidart “one of the great poems of our time.” So check out this bold new volume, sample a poem below, and make sure to stop back next month for Poetry 365.
Glutton
Ropes of my dead
grandmother’s unreproducible
.
sausage, curing for weeks
.
on the front porch. My mother,
thoroughly
.
Americanized, found them .
vaguely shameful.
Now though I
.
taste and taste
.
I can’t find that
taste I so loved as a kid.
.
Each thing generates the Idea
.
of itself, the perfect thing that it
is, of course, not —
.
once, a pear so breathtakingly
.
succulent I couldn’t
breathe. I take back that
.
“of course.”
.
It’s got to be out there again,–
. . . I have tasted it.
.
Russell J. (Readers’ Services)
