BIDART, FRANK

born 1939, California American poet whose introspective verse, notably dramatic monologues by troubled characters, deal with personal guilt, family life, and madness. His unconventional punctuation and typography give his colloquial and economical style an added emphasis. Bidart graduated from the University of California, Riverside, and later studied at Harvard University. His first volume of verse was Golden State (1973). It contains Golden State, an autobiographical account of a father-and-son relationship, and Herbert White, the lurid musings of a psychopathic pedophile. The Book of the Body (1977) features the dramatic monologues of an amputee and of a suicidal anorexic. Critical acclaim attended Bidart's publication of The Sacrifice (1983), a collection of five long poems about guilt, among them The War of Vaslav Nijinsky, an ambitious mixture of poetry and prose about the dancer's obsession with the tragedies of World War I, and Confessional, a psychiatric examination of a mother-and-son relationship. In the Western Night: Collected Poems 196590 was published in 1990.