Against Silence

An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and “one of the undisputed master poets of our time” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR)

Words, images reek of the worlds from which they

emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable

aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise.

Words―a gap, nonetheless always and forever,

between words and the world―

slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish.

Set up a situation,―

. . . then reveal an abyss.

For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eleventh collection of poetry, he urges others to join the chorus. Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa, but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls forth―with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.