The Cosmos Poems [Paperback]

Frederick Seidel (Author), Anselm Kiefer (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2000

New poems from the author of Going Fast, with original illustrations by Anselm Kiefer.

A can of shaving cream inflates A ping-pong ball of lather, Thick, hot, smaller than an atom, soon The size of the world.

This does take time to happen. Back at the start Again, a pinprick swells so violently It shoots out

Hallways to other worlds, But keeps expanding Till it is all There is. The universe is all there is. --from "Mirror Full of Stars"

The Cosmos Poems were commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History to inaugurate and celebrate their new planetarium, which will open in the year 2000.

This limited edition is signed by the author.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Every word [of Seidel's poems] works, and every false note seems calculated." -- Adam Phillips, Raritan

As an attempt to merge poetic meditation and scientific speculation, it is both earnest and user-friendly. -- The New York Times Book Review, Albert Mobilio

About the Author

Frederick Seidel's previous books of poems are Final Solutions; Sunrise, winner of the Lamont Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; These Days; Poems 1959-1979; My Tokyo (FSG, 1993); and Going Fast (FSG, 1998). He lives in New York City.

Product Details

• Paperback: 112 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st edition (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374130205
• ISBN-13: 978-0374130206
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 8.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,191,455 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Seidel, on fairly good behavior, January 18, 2011

By 

Althea (Olympic Peninsula, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cosmos Poems (Paperback)

The Cosmos Poems are disarmingly deep and equally daffy, with few of Seidel's usual caustics or hostilities, though written with his customary fragmentation and abrupt lane changes. The 33 poems that comprise the book are all written in quatrains--though that appears to be a nominal concession to form in order to wreak havoc elsewhere. One gets used to his unlikely juxtapositions and strange bursts of imagery after a while, but at first it's like listening to a CD with a scratch on the disc--a coherent phrase here, a snatch of haphazard genius there and plenty of raw noise in-between.

He might have a reason for writing like this and it might have to do with his impatience with his own intelligence. Seidel is obviously a smart guy but he's not about the obvious. He's about covert beauty, the balancing of ambiguity and arch observation, and speed. His manner of communicating is glancing at best. He doesn't do live readings and it's no wonder--telepathy would be required to catch half of what he is suggesting. Even on the page it's no picnic. Intuitively I started filling in the blanks between the lucid lines and the furtive allusions with everything I knew about the Cosmos--light speed, dark matter, time, dimensionality, gravity--but it was still hard to track his trajectory. So in a sense, these poems are oddly interactive, with the reader maintaining the creative vacuum of background space so that Seidel can use language to generate alternate Galaxies that form and dissolve in seconds.

These poems were commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History for the opening of its new Planetarium. I can only imagine what the project managers thought when they received Seidel's manuscript. Is he some sort of lunatic? Is he mocking us? Both and more. He's also mocking himself, and taking a few ironic jabs at politics, religion and society while he's at it. What redeems all this is that he's seriously enamored with the weird science and the strange beauty of the Cosmos. Whatever it means to be human--to be bound by minds, bodies, and gravity to the planet and each other--he documents his connotations from a naïve, almost childlike perspective. This is unusual for him. The enfant terrible of American poetry, confronted by something so vast and so seemingly indifferent as the Cosmos, crawls up in the lap of it, and sits there twiddling contentedly with his action figures. The Universe smiles a little at his audacity, but doesn't push him off.