Critical Essay | Critical Review by Paul Breslin

Critical Review by Paul Breslin

SOURCE: A review of The Best Hour of the Night, in Poetry, Vol. CXLV, No. 3, December, 1984, pp. 161–63.

In the following excerpt, Breslin offers a positive assessment of The Best Hour of the Night.

The various experiments in making poetry more like prose over the last thirty years or so have often involved a suspicion of complexity or nuance; Frank Bidart and Louis Simpson stand out for their willingness to use the full range of educated speech. The uses to which they put that speech, however, differ widely. Bidart dwells continually on what Vaslav Nijinsky, the speaker of the long opening poem, calls “the Great Questions / like WAR and GUILT and GOD / and MADNESS.” The language of Bidart's poetry is almost scholastic in its stark moral analysis, and one poem, “Confessional,” imitates the question-and-answer mode of the catechism, the psychoanalytic hour, and the confession booth. Simpson,...
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