Against SilenceAgainst Silence

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. 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.