Customer Reviews

Poems 1959-2009

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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If you doubt the unacceptability of the truth, than read Mark Twains previously unpublished essay,"The Privilege of the Grave," its about the price of free speech.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.

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.

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.

It is always a treat to see what happens to a poet's work over a long time and this book does that well. Frederick Seidel is not for every reader. Some poems are too dense for most readers, including me. But his use of words take leaps into the unknown that are pleasing and challenging. This is a worthwhile addition to any poetry collection.

Frederick Seidel has firmly established himself over the last decade as the enfant terrible of the international poetry community, and in so doing, has undoubtedly experienced the greatest late-career flowering of talent since Wallace Stevens. Yet he has none of the characteristic reserve and formalism of that lone peer (with all due respect to Stevens). Ezra Pound at his most irascible, Ogden Nash in his few moments of relevance, the cool scrutiny of the confessional poets--these are Seidel's touchstones. He is more apt to write a dirty limerick than an epic, more familiar with luxury and splendor than the cliché poetic squalor. In fact, with his immense wealth and jetsetting acquaintances, he seems to be working in the opposite direction of modern poetry. Which is exactly where his skill shines through.

It is no exaggeration to call Seidel the best poet currently writing in English. No American poet has come close to his level of range and accomplishment since Robert Lowell's death in 1977. He has only been acknowledged in recent years, however, because of the oddity he represents among writers. Besides James Merrill (whose father, as a founder of Merrill-Lynch, left him an unbreakable trust fund), Seidel is the only poet of the modern era to have the aid of a private fortune to support him. This has allowed him not only ease of publication (with Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, no less) but the liberty of writing with absolute honesty. His sarcasm and viciousness have led some to call him the Hannibal Lecter of the literary world, a comparison as short-sighted as it is predictable.

"I want to date-rape life," he begins one poem, not only satirizing a culture that produces date-rape but the Whitmanesque joy for life. In another, he compares his glass of Haut-Brion to a crystal pistol, the barrel of which he's sucking "to get a bullet to [his] brain." Yet these are only excerpts (and oft-quoted ones at that). Seidel's work is full of memorable and grotesque images, all anchored by an ear formally trained in the modernist tradition. His collections of the decade from 1998 to 2008 are unlike anything else in all poetry, most resembling J.G. Ballard's dystopian fictions of ultra-modernity and decay.

Frederick Seidel, as one reviewer has noted, is the poet the twentieth century deserved, and, one might add, the one the twenty-first needs. All excess, all right-wing insanity, are self-parodying for the conscientious man who has them at his fingertips. His is a fight against complacency, our slobbering at the breast of consumerism. "Anything," Seidel writes, "is better than this/Bliss."

This is a superb collection by a living poet who will eventually be canonized as one of the best in our time. Buy yourself a new leather reading chair, pour yourself a glass, and enjoy. A little on the dark and perverse side, but Seidel is never boring. Bravo, sir!

I dind't find this book one that I am glad I purchased. In fact, I intend to give it away. No beautiful or memorable images or language and much that is offensive. Is this poetry? Not in my book. Don't waste your money on this one.

J.Goldman