Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016
$32.99
Gathered together, the poems of Frank Bidart perform one of the most remarkable transmutations of the body into language in contemporary literature. His pages represent the human voice in all its extreme registers, whether it’s that of the child murderer Herbert White, the obsessive anorexic Ellen West, the tormented genius Vaslav Nijinsky, or the poet’s own. And in that embodiment is a transgressive empathy, one that recognizes our wild appetites, the monsters, the misfits, the misunderstood among us, and inside of us. Few writers have so willingly ventured to the dark places of the human psyche, and allowed themselves to be stripped bare on the page with such candor and vulnerability. Over the past half century, Bidart has done nothing less than invent a poetics commensurate with the chaos and hunger of our experience.
Half-light encompasses all of Bidart’s previous books, and also includes a new collection, Thirst, in which the poet disarmingly surveys his life, laying it plain for us before venturing into something yet again new and unknown. Here Bidart finds himself a “Creature coterminous with thirst,” still longing, still searching in himself, one of the “queers of the universe.”
Visionary and revelatory, intimate and unguarded, the collected works of Frank Bidart are a radical confrontation with human nature, a conflict eternally renewed and reframed, restless line by restless line.
Pan Macmillan acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and their connections to lands, waters and communities.
We pay our respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. We honour more than sixty thousand years of storytelling, art and culture.
© Pan Macmillan Australia 2025