No one can be neutral about Seidel: to his admirers, he tells truths about American life that other poets are too cowardly to state-about our obsessions with sex and money; our love-hate relationship with terrorism and war; our hypocritical squeamishness about masculine desire. "I want to date-rape life," one poem begins. From early work imitative of Robert Lowell, Seidel became by the 1990s a fecund dazzler whose rhyming lines, clear and sharp as diamonds, face the facts and stare down headline news. "My subject has always been death and breasts and politics," he says in one poem. Arranged with 27 new poems first, and his debut volume, Final Solutions(1963) last, the hefty collection offers spicy surprises and sticky situations. "In the Mirror" finds Seidel at Claridge's, the expensive London hotel, musing, "I wouldn't dream of plastic surgery/ Unless it somehow helped the poetry." The 100 poems in The Cosmos Poems(2000) digress instead to science ("It is the invisible/ Dark matter we are not made of/ That I am afraid of"). Detractors will ask whether Seidel relies too much, too often, on shock value, and whether he simply celebrates the voraciously boastful ego he claims to mock. This retrospective will continue to fuel that debate. (Apr.)
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The most frightening American poet ever—phallus-man, hangman of political barbarism—Seidel is the poet the twentieth century deserved.” —Calvin Bedient, Boston Review
“He radiates heat. It is apparent that he has asked himself frightful questions and has not dodged the implications of their equally frightful answers . . . A master of metaphor.” —Louise Bogan, The New Yorker
“Beguiling and magisterial.” —Joel Brouwer, The New York Times Book Review
“Profoundly beautiful . . . The writer willing to say the unsayable.” —Philip Connors, n+1
“The best verse out of the United States since whenever.” —Joe Fiorito, The Toronto Star
“Among the two or three finest poets writing in English.” —Alex Halberstadt, New York
“[Final Solutions] seems to me one of the most moving and powerful books of poetry to have come along in years.” —Anthony Hecht, The New York Review of Books
“Area Code 212 [is] our new Waste Land, as monitory and radical . . . as Eliot's poem was in 1922.” —George Held, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A triumphant outsider in American poetry . . . He takes risks utterly unthinkable, even as merely mutinous provocation, in an academic workshop.” —Ernest Hilbert, Contemporary Poetry Review
“[Life on Earth] is an exemplary book . . . One of the best by an American poet in the past twenty years.” —Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement
“One of the world's most inspired and unusual poets . . . His poems are a triumph of cosmic awe in the face of earthly terror.” —Hillel Italie, USA Today
“In American poetry today there is no one with Frederick Seidel's sheer ambition, comprehensive sense of our times, sophistication, nerve and skill . . . One of the most vital and important poets we have.” —Lawrence Joseph, The Nation
“The excellent table manners combined with a savage display of appetite: this is what everyone notices in Seidel. Yet he wouldn't be so special or powerful a poet of what's cruel, corrupt, and horrifying had he not also lately shown himself to be a great poet of innocence.” —Benjamin Kunkel, Harper's Magazine
“In the desert of contemporary American poetry, Frederick Seidel's work awaits the weary reader like an oasis.” —James Lasdun, The Guardian
“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
“Frederick Seidel is a ghoul, and he has produced this nascent century's finest collection of English poems.” —Michael Robbins, Chicago Review
“Frederick Seidel, for fifty years and across ten collections, has been writing our most serious, beautiful, and essential poems, poems that are shocking in their art and astonishing in their truth, and that remind us, in their forms, why poetry was once a vital part of cultural life” —Wyatt Mason, Harper's "Weekend Read"
