Synopses & Reviews
"You Can't Like Seidel's Poems--They're Deliberately Virulent; You Can Only Gasp At Their Skill And Daring, Their Sickening Warp, Their Mercilessness."*Frederick Seidel's highly acclaimed Cosmos Trilogy is a triple thunderclap of darkness from the poet whom Richard Poirier has recently called "the true heir of Walt Whitman" and of whose first book Robert Lowell wrote "[I] suspect the possibilities of modern poetry have been changed. Here is power that strikes." Reversing the course of Dante's Divine Comedy, Seidel's trilogy begins in the heavens, with The Cosmos Poems, and descends, passing through the Purgatorio of Life on Earth to arrive in Manhattan in Area Code 212.
Frederick Seidel's previous books of poetry include Final Solutions; Sunrise, winner of the Lamont Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; These Days; Poems, 1959-1979; My Tokyo; Going Fast; Area Code 212; Life on Earth; and The Cosmos Poems. He received the 2002 PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry.
The Cosmos Trilogy gathers Seidels three previous volumes of poetry, which together comprise a dark yet comicand widely acclaimedopus, a perverse, prophetic masterwork from the poet whom Richard Poirier has called "the true heir of Walt Whitman."
Reversing Dante's Divine Comedy, Seidels trilogy begins in the heavens, with The Cosmos Poems, descends through the purgatory of Life on Earth, and ends in the hellish Manhattan of Area Code 212. As Susan Wheeler has noted, “Not since Milton dangled Creation on its chain from Paradise has our universe been more urgently displayed.”
"[Seidel] grips the twentieth century between his teeth like a blade as he speaks . . . [He is] one of the more formidable poets of the last third of [that] century."Calvin Bedient, Poetry
"Area Code 212 [is] our new Waste Land, as monitory and radical [today] as T.S. Eliot's poem was in 1922. Eliot never won a Pulitzer, but Seidel should win the next one."George Held, The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Life on Earth is an exemplary book, Seidel's best, and one of the best by an American poet in the past twenty years."Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement
"The humor behind [The Cosmos Poems] is savage; it is funny and sinister at once . . . Just as bonsai pots are designed to twist up a tree's affect through constraint, so Seidel's stanzas catch tornadoes in clay."Robyn Creswell, Raritan
"[Seidel] grips the twentieth century between his teeth like a blade as he speaks . . . [He is] one of the more formidable poets of the last third of [that] century."Calvin Bedient, Poetry
"Unafraid of being unacceptable, Seidel emerges as an oddity, one of the rare poets who, in retelling a tale from Ovid's Metamorphoses, can say, 'Fuck the muse,' and still sing."Brian Henry, The Threepenny Review
"The moral thrills of [Seidel's] poetry can be as daunting as the moral spills, the cruel intelligence of glamour as alluring as the mystical stillness that is somewhere also at the heart of his poetry . . . Here is the new kind of visionary, the person who really wants to change the world fast, the person who believes in something."Adam Phillips, Raritan
"In an era that fancies itself particularly gender-tender, [this] poet doesn't pull his punches in accounts of encounters with women. His is a conspicuously male slant on matters of sexual engagement. As a woman, and more precisely as a woman alert to every stripe of lyric fire, I find myself more moved by Seidel's brutal, excruciated 'Recessional' . . . than by any of a thousand more conventional mournings. His work deserves more celebration than it gets."Heather McHugh, Lingua Franca
Review
[Seidel] grips the twentieth century between his teeth like a blade as he speaks...One of the more formidable poets of the last third of the century." Calvin Bedient, Poetry
Review
"[Life on Earth] is an exemplary book, Seidel's best, and one of the best by an American poet in the past twenty years." Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement
Review
"Desperate [and] affecting...The poems of Area Code 212 do not aspire to be up-to-the-minute; for Seidel...there is no other way to be." Robyn Creswell, The Nation
Review
"Unafraid of being unacceptable, Seidel emerges as an oddity, one of the rare poets who, in retelling a tale from Ovid's Metamorphoses, can say, 'Fuck the muse,' and still sing." Brian Henry, The Threepenny Review
Review
"The moral thrills of his poetry can be as daunting as the moral spills, the cruel intelligence of glamour as alluring as the mystical stillness that is somewhere also at the heart of his poetry . . . Here is the new kind of visionary, the person who really wants to change the world fast, the person who believes in something." Adam Phillips, Raritan
Review
"Seidel's real strangeness is not so abstract or academic. He is in fact one of the very rare contemporary poets who can be transgressive, not in the fashionable way of the seminar but in the disturbing way of the nightmare....[H]e is drawn to everything that is overripe, over-civilized, luxuriant to the point of putridity: to decadence, as an experience and an aesthetic. And against the odds, Seidel manages to transform decadence, that old pose, into the basis for a genuine and powerful poetry." Adam Kirsch, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)
Synopsis
"You Can't Like Seidel's Poems--They're Deliberately Virulent; You Can Only Gasp At Their Skill And Daring, Their Sickening Warp, Their Mercilessness."*Frederick Seidel's highly acclaimed Cosmos Trilogy is a triple thunderclap of darkness from the poet whom Richard Poirier has recently called "the true heir of Walt Whitman" and of whose first book Robert Lowell wrote "[I] suspect the possibilities of modern poetry have been changed. Here is power that strikes." Reversing the course of Dante's Divine Comedy, Seidel's trilogy begins in the heavens, with The Cosmos Poems, and descends, passing through the Purgatorio of Life on Earth to arrive in Manhattan in Area Code 212.
About the Author
Frederick Seidel's previous books of poems include
Final Solutions;
Sunrise, These Days;
Poems, 1959-1979;
My Tokyo (FSG, 1993);
Going Fast (FSG, 1998);
The Cosmos Poems (FSG, 2000); and
Life on Earth (FSG, 2001).