Desire
Frank Bidart
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20

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by David Gewanter

The haunting dramas of Frank Bidart's latest book, Desire, add to a body of work already rivaling twentieth-century poetry's great spiritual inquiries: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets and W. B. Yeats's A Vision. Eliot sought resolution, if not absolution, in Anglican dogma; he casts a drama of existential nihilism as the dark night from which the soul turning to God can escape. Yeats saw no hell below heaven and earth, but sought another realm of being. He adopted a Heraclitean exchange-mortals and immortals living each other's deaths-to lyrics such as "Sailing to Byzantium" and "The Gyres." Bidart's new poems explore the night-world of desire where, as an earlier poem claims, "WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE" ("Guilty of Dust"). The speakers-each an actor, victim, and witness to desire-recognize that by seeking love we discover what is within us: "I fulfill it, because I contain it" ("The Second Hour of the Night"). In this we find a Romantic ideal, love and self-love fused in the passion for "one of the sparrows which fly by," although our desires for the forbidden may prove stronger: "once you have seen a hand cut off, or / a foot, or a head, you have embarked, have begun … / The voyage" ("As the Eye to the Sun").

The soul's dilemma, then, is how to embrace a passion for what is horrifying and destructive when the consciousness of such desire could annihilate the self. Here Bidart covers familiar ground; indeed, his brilliant long poem "The Second Hour of the Night" offers us another nihilistic hero, Myrrha, to follow the memorable anti-selves of earlier poems, "Herbert White," "Ellen West," and "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky." In a narrative from Ovid, Myrrha lusts after her father; disguised, she enters his bedchamber:

As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father

not free not to desire

what draws her forward is neither
COMPULSION nor FREEWILL:-

or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be
imagined as action upon

preference: no creature is free to choose what
allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release:

I fulfill it, because I contain it-
it prevails, because it is within me-

it is a heavy burden, setting up longing to
enter that
realm to which I am called from within…

As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father

not free not to choose

she thinks, To each soul its hour.

Like the anorexic Ellen West, Myrrha must surrender to a monstrous desire, to what "even the gods call [a] GIVEN" of her existence; she races to comprehend and articulate her passion, a passion which, "if you do NOT resist it CANNOT be reached"-and which, if expressed fully, will destroy her.

Myrrha is fulfilled, literally, becoming pregnant by her father with Adonis. Escaping her father's wrath, she seeks refuge on an island, one that "she spent childhood / approaching," and asks the gods to make her "nothing / human: not alive, not dead." The gods comply, changing her into the myrrh (balsam) tree; Bidart offers its "sweet-smelling / bitter resin" to his (complicit) audience:

O you who looking within the mirror discover
in gratitude how common, how lawful your
desire,

before the mirror
anoint your body with myrrh

precious bitter resin

The act of transformation creates a new nature for Myrrha and her story of "unnatural" desire. In Metamorphosis X.310, Ovid concludes that the "new tree was not worth so great a price" but the act of translating Myrrha's body makes it a work of art: she has become a "local habitation" that will not offend nature. If, as Bidart says, the "body hammering a nail nails / itself" ("Catullus: Excrucior"), the body can also serve as the material for art, and sacrifice itself before a consciousness whose demands are suprahuman, and whose desires, like those of "beasts and gods," are "unstained by disgust or dread or terror."

Yeats's sailor asked the singing masters of Byzantium to "consume [his] heart away," and to live "out of nature." Bidart's speakers must live in painful isolation as well; his lyrics-perhaps arias is a better term-emerge from a world deprived of blandishments and surface distractions, of the multiform experience that feeds the poetry of, say, Mark Strand or Gerald Stern. The somber tone throughout Bidart's work offers the challenge of "high seriousness" to the democratic opportunities of contemporary free verse, even as the unique "look" of his verse-frames (marked by an expressive use of italics, capital letters, punctuation, etc., in what Bidart has called a "'deploying' [of] words on the page" ) has, in this volume, returned more to present-day practice. The radical pressure for inventiveness, always felt in Bidart's work and often seen in his typography, is portrayed most directly in Desire's single prose piece, "Borges and I," an ars poetica reflecting both Borges's original meditation (in which the author examines his relationship to "the other one, the one called Borges," who shares his preferences, but "in a vain way that converts them into the attributes of an actor") and Bidart's own determined effort to create a true medium of the self. "We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed" he begins (in hieratic tones later reiterated as a summation of Myrrha's fate):

Frank had the illusion that though the universe of one of his poems seemed so close to what seemed his own universe at the second of writing it that he wasn't sure how they differed even though the paraphernalia often differed, after he had written it its universe was never exactly his universe, and so, soon, it disgusted him a little, the mirror was dirty and cracked.

Secretly he was glad it was dirty and cracked, because after he had made a big order, a book, only when he had come to despise it a little, only after he had at last given up the illusion that this was what was, only then could he write more.

He felt terror at the prospect of becoming again the person who could find or see or make no mirror, for even Olivier, trying to trap the beast who had killed his father, when he suavely told Frank as Frank listened to the phonograph long afternoons lying on the bed as a kid, when Olivier told him what art must be, even Olivier insisted that art is a mirror held up by an artist who himself needs to see something, held up before a nature that recoils before it.

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.

Everything in art is a formal question, so
he tried to do it in prose with much blank white space.

Bidart/Borges proposes an "essential self"-the one speaking now to us-and a "second self" who "seeks embodiment through making things," but who (as thinkers such as Marx or Cassirer understood) becomes "something false." Since "survival meant ceasing to be" what the essential self was, the speaker must somehow establish what is both new and authentic. The solution, in Desire, is to make the body a site interpenetrated by both art and the flesh. In "Borges and I," the young "Frank listened to the phonograph long afternoons lying on the bed as a kid." In "Overheard Through the Walls of the Invisible City," the subject seeks fulfillment in flesh:

. . . telling those who swarm around him his desire
is that an appendage from each of them
fill, invade each of his orifices,-

repeating, chanting,
Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah Oh yeah

until, as if in darkness he craved the sun, at last he reached
consummation.

-Until telling those who swarm around him begins again

(we are the wheel to which we are bound).

In this modern revision of Ixion's torture, the body becomes an artifice, a form created from both willed action and flesh.

In "The Second Hour of the Night," Myrrha's passion and dilemma, then, are in some sense "artistic": how to realize unspeakable desire, how to create from the flesh that created you. Ovid puts the problem neatly: quia iam meus est, non est meus- "because he is mine, he is not mine." Myrrha becomes "Pygmalion and her father the statue" that her lust brings to life; then he becomes the artist and she the living artifice. The myth takes on personal significance later in the poem, when the speaker telling us Ovid's tale is visited by his own deceased lover:

. . . grace is the dream, half-
dream, half-
light, when you appear and do not answer the question

that I have asked you, but courteously
ask (because you are dead) if you can briefly

borrow, inhabit my body.

When I look I can see my body
away from me, sleeping.

I say Yes. Then you enter it

like a shudder as if eager again to know
what it is to move within arms and legs.

I thought, I know that he will return it.

I trusted in that none
earlier, none other.

By such submission, the speaker makes incarnate the spirit of his desire, creating-however briefly-a soul mate within his own body. For Myrrha, "the source of ecstasy is / not chosen"; but for the speaker of "The Second Hour of the Night," the site of this second self can be.

In depicting this final, quiet union, the long poem of Desire exceeds the scope of Bidart's earlier work, where life was sacrificed before art, and insight became subsumed under tragic knowledge. Desire offers us a spiritual guidebook, but one that shows a darker, more complete sense of the spirit than either Eliot or Yeats allowed. Transcendence for Bidart is not a raising of the self toward church deities, nor a search for familiar voices in the twilight of consciousness, but an ecstatic plummet of the self, quieted and enlarged from the shocked recognition of its potential. Bidart's gift in these poems is to bring into lyric consciousness our most compelling ontological questions, to bring them to us in clear, personal terms, as when memorializing the death that gave rise the poems of Desire:

It is what recurs that we believe,
your face not at one moment looking
sideways up at me anguished or

elate, but the old words welling up by
gravity rearranged:
two weeks before you died in

pain worn out, after my usual casual sign-off
with All my love, your simple
solemn My love to you, Frank.

("If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove")