Music Like Dirt

About this book

Frank Bidart writes of Music Like Dirt "I wanted to make a sequence in which the human need to make is seen as not only central but inescapable. I wanted not a tract but a tapestry in which making is seen in the context of the other processessexuality mortalityinseparable from it." "Bidart has patiently amassed as profound and original a body of work as any now being written in this country. He has given form for our age to what is most urgent and most private in the human soul: the ordeals of solitude and mortality and hunger and recently that action through which being speaks: the drive to make or create. Bidarts poems sound like no one elses; they look like no one elses. . . . He is in the feeling of our jury one of the great poets of our time."Louise Glck jury chair 2001 Wallace Stevens Award The Academy of American Poets The inaugural edition in Sarabandes Quarternote Chapbook Series which will feature a select group of poets by invitation only Frank Bidarts collections of poetry include Desire (1997) which received the 1998 Bobbitt Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize; In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 (1990); The Sacrifice (1983); The Book of the Body (1977); and Golden State (1973). Among his many honors are the Lila Acheson Wallace/Readers Digest Fund Writers Award the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters the Shelley Award of the Poetry Society of America and the Lannan Literary Award. He teaches at Wellesley College and lives in Cambridge Massachusetts.