Frank Bidart is best known for writing long poems. "The Sacrifice," for instance, was a collection of just five poems, among them "The War of Vaslav Nijinsky" and "Confessional."

This latest collection is ostensibly different, since none of the poems included is especially long, but the impression of unity it conveys and the way in which phrases and images echo throughout make it seem almost a single poem in the form of a suite, just as what makes for a single ballet is a sequence of dances.

Ballet, in fact, figures in the central -- and, at just over nine pages, the longest -- poem, "Ulanova At Forty-six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle."

The title refers to a film of the legendary Russian ballerina Galina Ulanova performing the title role in Adolphe Adam's "Giselle" during the Bolshoi's visit to England in 1956. Bidart apparently saw it the following year:

"Ulanova came to Pomono California in
1957 as light projected on a screen
to make me early in college see what art is."

A prose passage interpolated into the poem reveals that "the poem I have never been able to write has very tentative title: 'Ulanova At Forty-six At Last Dances Before a Camera Giselle.' ... About burning an image into the soul of an eighteen-year-old (me) of the severity and ferocity at the root of classic art, addicted to mimesis."

Later, though, in a poem titled "Little O," these lines appear:

"At sixty-six
you have done whatever you do
many times before. Disgust with mimesis --
... is as necessary as mimesis: as the conventions
the world offers out of which to construct your
mirror fail, to see your face you
intricately, invisibly reinvent them."

"Little O" comes toward the end of this collection. But when you read those lines, something clicks, and you feel impelled to look back over what you've read so far. Lo and behold, 30 pages earlier, in "You Cannot Rest," you come upon these lines:

The great grounding
events in your life ... the great
grounding events that left you so changed
you cannot conceive your face without their
happening, happened when someone
could receive.

The moment of recall triggered by the later poem gives you the actual experience of remembrance that is what this book is largely about. And it is vital to know how Bidart's poems work in order to fully appreciate what he is trying to get across in them.

Together, the poems provide a kind of spectrographic analysis of the crystal that is the self, and if the "Ulanova" poem is the centerpiece of the collection, the poem that seems best to encapsulate it is "Seduction."

Early in this account of sexual maneuvering between two men, the phrase "make him" is pivotally positioned and repeated:

Make him
see that you alone decipher within him
the lineaments of the giant. Make him
see that you alone can help him shape
the inchoate works of his hand ...

The poem concludes: "In revenge/you chose submission, chose power."

The sexual connotation of the word "make" in this context is obvious. But once again, the words hark back to what has gone before: Only a few pages earlier, in "Old Man at the Wheel," we have been told that "By exorcism/you survived. By submission, then making."

In other words, between the "make" at the beginning of "Seduction" and the "submission" at the end lies not only the experience recounted, but the recounting itself. Or, as Bidart has already put it in "Old Man at the Wheel:"

You let all the parts of that thing you would
cut out of you enter your poem because
enacting there all its parts allowed you
the illusion you could cut it from your soul.

For all his frank language -- a number of lines are not suitable for quoting in a family newspaper -- Bidart is a strangely evasive poet, concealing as much as he reveals, though what is concealed is itself revealing. Still, in his convoluted, elliptical way, he has managed in this book to create an unsparing self-portrait that you can't take your eyes off.