Listening at the Monteleone vii: Pacings of Advent

          There is a king inside the king that the king
          does not acknowledge ..

          The glittering ship captained by darkness
          swiftly, evenly, crosses and

          recrosses.

          I have seen it. I cannot
          forget. Memory is a fact of the soul.

Frank Bidart's poem, of which this
is a fragment, runs for 30 pages in
the edition of the small collection
which it ends. He has remarked that
this poem seemed to him to climax
many years of working finally to re-
lease it, and one can believe that.

Then when such a work emerges I'd
guess it's never so much out of sea-
son, as beyond seasons. This is at
least how it strikes me. The Monte-
leone series is where it fits here. 






















Frank Bidart
Desire
  The Second Hour
  of the Night
  [extract]
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
op. cit.