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Rating: 
Summary: There is a REVIEW within the REVIEW
Review: I tend to agree with the reviewer from Oregon. Melissa S. Green seems to have a read a different book. Since the words "emotionally articulate" and "uncompromisingly intelligent" were used, I won't use them anymore.Instead: MUSICALITY. Bidart's poems have their own painful rhythms that are found not only in line breaks...but rather in the line displays, indentions, use of punctuations and capitalizations. To paraphrase Vendler, each poem is like a music sheet--it doesn't only contain the notes but the accents as well. With much use of repetition, Bidart creates suh disturbing music which works for the pieces, at times pronounced, at times implicit, until these repetitions occur in several other pieces. The strength of the collected poems is the sustained vision throughout the years. Like Jorie Graham's "Dream of the Unified Field", here is a collection of books that seems to have that consciousness of being collected in the future, on hindsight. Twelve years later, this collection matters a lot.
Rating:
Summary: There is a REVIEW within the REVIEW
Review: I tend to agree with the reviewer from Oregon. Melissa S. Green seems to have a read a different book. Since the words "emotionally articulate" and "uncompromisingly intelligent" were used, I won't use them anymore. Instead: MUSICALITY. Bidart's poems have their own painful rhythms that are found not only in line breaks...but rather in the line displays, indentions, use of punctuations and capitalizations. To paraphrase Vendler, each poem is like a music sheet--it doesn't only contain the notes but the accents as well. With much use of repetition, Bidart creates suh disturbing music which works for the pieces, at times pronounced, at times implicit, until these repetitions occur in several other pieces. The strength of the collected poems is the sustained vision throughout the years. Like Jorie Graham's "Dream of the Unified Field", here is a collection of books that seems to have that consciousness of being collected in the future, on hindsight. Twelve years later, this collection matters a lot.
Rating: 
Summary: Mr. Bidart is our best emotional and fearless poet.
Review: I was confused at Ms. Greens online review of Bidart's collected poems 'In the Western Night'. I would almost hazard a guess that Ms. green had read a different book altogether. Mr. Bidart is one of the few poets of his generation who is both emotionally articulate and uncompromisingly intelligent. He is able, as few are, to look at the darkness or often horror of this world and not patronize it by inventing hope where there isn't any, or relying on empty though pretty lyric gestures to make things 'all right'. His radical, and neccesary, punctuation was come too over the course of his first two books.The punctuation, as Jonathan Galassi and Donald Hall have pointed out, informs the poem as deeply as line breaks do. It seems to me that Mr. Bidart's poems are some of the few that can hold an honest dialogue with the violence that we are a part of today.He is, in the end, a surprising and wonderful poet.
Rating:
Summary: Modernist experiments meet confessional subjects.
Review: The best poems in this book launch themselves from Ezra Pound's experimentation with the use of letters, multiple voices, translation and other decidedly non-poetic materials, disjointedly culling these things together to create meaning in how they resonate off one another. Bidart similarly uses letters, grammatical errors, capitalized words, quotes from journals, etc, to infuse into his poems' forms meaning that is crucial to the emotional and narrative understanding coming from the meaning and music of the words themselves. An important achievement. Bidart's success at this is in part what makes readers blow off Pound's Cantos. Bidart's interest is in human relations, and illustrated these through small interactions. While Pound had similar goals in mind, he never stayed long in the personal interaction, jumping so quickly to usury, metamorphosis, and other topics and grand modernist allusiveness. The reader feels to put-out. Bidart stayed with the people, with their hurt. Lowell taught this. Readers can argue the effectiveness, can worry about whether it is wrong for a writer to take interest in his/her own life, but Bidart has in his poems fused two hugely important poetic movements, and has enlarged the understanding of what poetry can be.
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