Poems 1959-2009 [Hardcover]

Frederick Seidel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374126550 | ISBN-13: 978-0374126551 | Publication Date: March 31, 2009 | Edition: First Edition

These are the collected poems of a master whose work includes many of the most compelling, savage, and tender poems in the language. Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, “the best American poet writing today.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“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"

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374126550
• ISBN-13: 978-0374126551
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #842,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Deal, July 1, 2009

By 

Bartleby (scrivner) "Tough critic" (Southern Pines, NC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poems 1959-2009 (Hardcover)

Discovering Seidel was a breath of fresh, although sometimes malodorous, like life can be, air. His honesty is courageous, he's willing to say things we think but wouldn't have the guts to say. He's a practitioner of "free speech" and that's bound to make a lot of people unhappy and he will be shunned.
If you doubt the unacceptability of the truth, than read Mark Twains previously unpublished essay,"The Privilege of the Grave," its about the price of free speech.
I agree with the reviewer who said, pull up a chair and enjoy, exactly what I'm doing and I will greive finishing his collected poems, but I'm sure I'll spend a lifetime rereading and learning from them.
Seidel's said that his poetry is incomprehensible to him, some of its incomprehensible to me, but then again I like Gertrude Stein who's totally incomprehensible. But they're having a good time, Seidel's poetry is, to the bone, honest, shocking,funny,whimsical, sad, and, perhaps most important of all, existentially instructive. If you want solace for life, this is it with no punches pulled. He reminds me of the best of the Theatre of the Absurd, he's a living breathing character out of "Waiting for Godot," racing motorcycles, courting, thus defying death, living an unapologetic sybaritic life, at least he used to, he's 73 and may have scaled it back.
Is he a genius--no, he lacks grandeur. Do we need more of his kind of poetry--indubitably.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real-world poetry, June 4, 2009

By 

gin16 (Now, usa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poems 1959-2009 (Hardcover)

Janice, by all means give your copy to someone who reads poetry. Seidel is the real thing, and this work, however challenging, is for readers who live in our time. Stimulating, scalding, sometimes a bit scary, but not the poetry of tea and crumpets.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A few good, and some infantile, poems, May 22, 2010

By 

BP Mills (Boulder County, CO) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poems 1959-2009 (Hardcover)

I like some of the pieces in this collection and I hate some of the pieces.
I rarely use the word hate, but that is a true feeling I have had after reading some of of his more pointless, meandering and cruel poems.
His poems about politics, this far removed from the deranged days of obsessive Bush-hating, seem juvenile, like an attention starved college student's work.
Hie upper east-side liberal take on the world (bitter, angry, paranoid), while he indulges in fast cars, young girls and exotic trips is the quintessential essence of his later work.
The critics who laud him probably do so because to go against him would make their snotty friends shun them.
Still, I give it three stars for the better, more inspired pieces.