The scrolls of the Essenes and history of this Jewish sect intrigued Wilson and in 1954 he journeyed to Israel to study the scrolls. His research first appeared in the New Yorker and was revised just before his death this returns his out of print classic to new audiences.

Robert Lowell, one of the latter 20th century's most popular poets, seems to have recently dropped off the radar. This is probably partially due to a critical point of view which has emerged, stating basically that Lowell was a product of his time and has now beem outmoded.

This book should dispel that feeling.

One need only look back on a poem like 'Memories Of West Street And Lepke' from Life Studies to realize that even if, in a hundred years, someone reads this having no idea who Lepke was, the poem could still be enjoyed. It is the poem itself, as Helen Vendler said in a round-about way, which makes the mark.

Despite the hefty price tag on this volume, if you're interested in Lowell, you should own this book. There's things here which simply cannot be found elsewhere: his first, and never again published Land Of Unlikeness, magazine versions of poems later revised in their book forms, poems in manuscript which Lowell never finished. Aside from the poems (which a dogged individual could track down in their book forms with Amazon and Alibris), it's these bonuses which make the volume special, and change that price tag from wow-that's-a-lot to it's-not-such-a-big-deal.

To say that 'if you're a Lowell fan' you should by this book is wrong. I should say, 'if you're a poetry fan'. This was a man who changed poetry forever. And aside from this historical aspect, they are some of the finest poems ever written.

I wish Bidart were more prolific, but on the bright side, each rare collection is an irresistible distillation of some thought-elixir. "Music Like Dirt" treats how humans are essentially art-making, art-sharing creatures. Since this is Bidart, we get both the good and evil consequences of this impulse - the grotesques along with the geniuses - in language that is simple, clear, but also finely wrought and deeply emotional.

Note that this is a chapbook, so even though it's beautifully printed it still has something of a flimsy feeling... It's perfectly sized and shaped to be a little gift to the favorite creative or artistic person in your life.

The real standouts in the collection, "For the Twentieth Century," "Advice to the Players," and "Lament for the Makers," are all available online, albeit coarsened by lousy layout and banner ads. Don't just read them quickly at your desk; print them out and read them somewhere peaceful in solitude, and you will probably end up wanting to buy the book anyway, they're that good.

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.

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.

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.

Robert Pinsky brilliantly translates into terza rima, the difficult rhyme scheme Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in, & does it with such grace, such linguistic precision & genius that the reader almost doesn't feel like it was difficult at all. This is something I don't know of any other translations that have been able to do in this work that's notoriously very difficult to translate. This amalgamation of the great timeless & inspired genius of Dante & the brilliance & severe dedication to poetic mastery of Robert Pinsky is far & away my favorite translation of the Inferno. Pinsky makes it so much more fun to read than other translations I know! Pinsky's version is great poetry, rife with perfect rhythms & mellifluous music.

Robert Pinsky offers a powerful translation of Dante's masterpiece. He found a way to convey a sense of Dante's rhyming scheme to the English speaker -- and he certainly captured Dante's vivid imagery.

Dante's powerful work is a masterful expression both of the world of his day and the cosmos as understood in Medieval times. But fear not -- it is also a spiritual journey, and that is timeless. The work has endless layers of depth and complexity -- but even on the surface Dante's vision of heaven, hell, and purgatory is gripping.

In addition to the power of the translation, Pinsky's edition offers valuable commentary by Pinsky and John Freccero. Pinsky's wife, Nicole, compiled the notes that are necessary for a modern reader to catch Dante's references.

Unfortunately, we only have Pinsky's translation of Inferno. To fully appreciate Dante's vision, you should go on to read Purgatorio and Paradiso. The second two parts of the work alter how one understands and relates to the first part. It's true that Inferno is more accessible to the modern reader; but the work demands to be read as a whole.

For those who find themselves drawn to Dante, I also recommend reading Sinclair's prose translation. The translations that attempt to preserve the poetry invariably alter the meaning of the work as written. To get the best perspective on Dante (short of reading the work in Italian!) it's helpful to read both a prose and a poetic translation. For the poetic half of the equation, it's hard to imagine a better version than this one.

It goes without saying that The Inferno is one of the great masterpieces of Western culture. That being the case, Pinksy, not Dante, is the focus of my review. This was the third translation of The Inferno that I have read (Mandelbaum and Ciardi being the others), and it is by far the most graceful of the group. I was particularly impressed with his handling of that ever present problem: the rhyme scheme. His solution to the problem is fluid and faithful to the original text (something Mandelbaum's rhyme-free translation lacks), without being distracting (as I found Ciardi's to be). But, what is truly amazing is that he is able to maintain this scheme without ever sounding forced or contrived. This allows Pinsky's tranlsation to remain first and foremost, a poem, which is so crucial in realizing the true genious of Dante's work. I was also pleased with Pinsky's decision to put a line of white space between each triplet. This really helped to accentuate the pacing and structure that make terza rima so important. The inclusion of the Italian text is also a nice touch. Finally, the notes are concise and informative. While Mandelbaum's notes seemed to me a little too thorough, often glossing the obvious, these give pertinent information without ever condescending to the reader. My only complaint would be that Pinksy stopped at the Inferno. I firmly believe that one must experience a work of art in its entirety in order to fully experience its brilliance. This is very true of the Divine Comedy. While there are certainly plenty of Purgatorios and Paradisos out there, I would very much have liked to have been able to maintain the continuity of a single translator. While there is a long list of translators who provide this option, I regret that Pinksy is not among them.

This book is self-indulgent tripe ... there's a fine line between the wonderful tradition of rewriting and reinterpreting previously-told stories (see Ann Carson's Autobiography of Red for an absolutely glittering example) and just retelling. In this case, the story of Cineras and Myrra is taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses and spun out in excruciating detail. The difference between Ovid (and for that matter Carson) and Bidart is that the former poets use interesting language, whereas Bidart's is boring and self-aggrandizing.

"The Second Hour of the Night" is probably the best long poem written in English in the past few decades. This book was robbed of the Pulitzer, and is worth buying (or just reading) for it alone. The first half of the book is, honestly, just filler. But the second, final poem makes up for it!

For some people the book might be self-indulgent, and Bidart "boring and self-aggrandizing" but Bidart is probably the most emotionally articulate writer of American poetry today. In this book Bidart proves his range, from the sweeping grandeur of "The second hour of the night" to the expansiveness of such gestures of restlessness found in "The yoke":

I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and

The question is, what's wrong with being self-indulgent if it serves the collection's purposes. Once more Bidart continues with his range of the English language through typographical manipulation on the page.