Poet examines urge to create and the struggle of it

Star Dust
By Frank Bidart
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 84 pp., $20

Most of us are susceptible to the allure surrounding ''masterworks" of art. But isn't there something even better? Aren't we most impressed by those phases in which already first-rate artists venture beyond their established styles? Think of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings from the late 1940s. Often a starkness enters the art at moments like these. Grandeur intertwines with vulnerability. It's an enthralling process to witness. And it's one that poetry readers of various tastes, even readers who bicker about everything else, have seen happening in the new poems of Frank Bidart.

Bidart has long stood at the center of American poetry. With his debut collection, ''Golden State," in 1973, his poems began to make their mark. Bidart showed a skill for conveying the full range of the voice, for capturing on the page the most intense bursts and twists of speech. He also brought a cinematic structure to his work: Here was a poetry that delivered all the suspense of a Martin Scorsese picture.

But there's a new voltage running through his latest collection, ''Star Dust." This book (named a finalist last week for the National Book Award) takes for its subject the fundamental human urge to create, to give meaning and shape to the chaotic rush of experience. Throughout the three carefully plotted sections, Bidart articulates a counterpoint between the grand achievement of making and the naked anguish behind it. Even the title of the book carries this dual charge: it suggests both an aura of otherworldly attainment and the barest stuff of which we're all composed.

Every poem in the book fleshes out this drama. Take ''Lament for Makers," the short lyric that ends the opening sequence of the book. The title alludes to William Dunbar's early 16th-century poem of the same name, a poem in which Dunbar mourns the deaths of his friends in the art. Here's how Bidart's lament begins:

Not bird not badger not beaver not beeMany creatures mustmake, but only one must seekwithin itself what to makeMy father's ring was a B with a dartthrough it, in diamonds against polished black stone.I have it. What parents leave youis their lives.

In the first four lines, with their tone of almost official wisdom, Bidart conveys the grand imperative to create. Yet ''makers" in his conception are not only poets, but all of us: from that overarching survey of all humankind, he homes in on his own family, and offers his readers the intimate disclosure about the ring, with its visual pun on his name. This alternation between the general and personal intensifies toward its end:

Until my mother died she struggled to makea house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.Many creatures mustmake, but only one must seekwithin itself what to makeNot bird not badger not beaver not bee Teach me, masters who by making wereremade, your art.

Those shifting tones fuse in the final lines: the invocation of the masters carries both the sense of a monumental ambition and the feeling of supreme vulnerability.

And there's truth to the rhyme that ripples through the free verse when the poem reaches its final word. Just as art has impelled the poet through the remaking of his self, so Bidart has remade the tradition of poetry in English. ''Star Dust" is not merely ''about" the desire to create: It exists as a superb embodiment of that urge.

You won't find any triumphalism in this book, however. The poet complicates his collection with at least two narratives, both of which oppose yet somehow inform the acts of creation. One is the frustrated love story that runs through the book, the story of an erotic connection that gains stinging intensity from its unconsummated suspension. The other is a narrative of destruction, which he sees as the twin of creation. He ends the final poem, ''The Third Hour of the Night," with a violent account of murder by an aboriginal Australian shaman.

That character acts as the nightmarish mirror of the central figure of the poem, the Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. And even Cellini carries a streak of destructive energy. His statue ''Perseus With Head of Medusa" stands in ''Star Dust" as the prime example of making. Yet throughout the sections of Cellini's autobiography that Bidart has transformed into poetry, the artist appears as a tormented soul, propelled by the most disordered emotions. The very process of creating his sculptures (known for their perfection) turns out to be one of great messiness. Making the Perseus sculpture, he ends up throwing all the kitchen crockery into the overheated forge. Then he describes the finished work:

Days later, when the bronze had cooled, when the claysheath had been with great care removed, I foundwhat was dead brought to life again.

The sculptor's act of bringing the dead to life mirrors the poet's own art. From Cellini to Bidart's parents, the dead come back with an uncanny presence in these pages. The living, in turn, are shown to be bound to the dead, just as the successes of high art are rooted in our barest urges. No living poet writes with Bidart's fusion of emotional ferocity and formal exactitude, of grand ambition and creaturely attentiveness. This is his strongest book.

Peter Campion's collection of poems, ''Other People," is out this month from the University of Chicago Press.