Photo credit: Emma Dodge Hanson

Star Dust shows that the forms of his originality continue to deepen and change as he constantly renews his contract with the idea of truth.

Frank Bidart’s previous collection of poetry was Desire, which was a Finalist for the National Book Award in 1997, and In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90. He also co-edited, with David Gewanter, Robert Lowell's Collected Poems (2003). He has received the Wallace Stevens Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation Writer's 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 Paris Review's first Bernard F. Conners Prize for "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" in 1981. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Wellesley College.

Judges' Citation

Star Dust conveys us into the art and hell of creative imagination, for the artist’s task, Frank Bidart tells us, is to fashion “out of the corruptible/body a new body good to eat a thousand years.” Art and hell are both subject and method. The poems are fearlessly elegant and dark – violence, longing, woe, will, and sweetness their province. They tell us our secrets, and they could not be more brilliantly made.