Frederick Seidel Selected Poems

November 1, 2020
In the third selected collection in Seidel's long career, following Poems 1959-1979 and Poems 1959-2009, readers are again reminded why they enjoy him so much. Seidel is savagely honest, and he tends to get to the point quickly, which can be startling and unnerving, as in ""France Now"": "I slide my swastika into your lubricious Place Clichy. I like my women horizontal and when they stand up vicious and Vichy." In a Paris Review interview he said, "I like writing disagreeable poems." Seidel doesn't ask for accord, nor does he particularly care. He is a scholar of privileged lives, recording observations as an iconoclast with poetic mastery, whether he's writing about Ducati motorcycles and their speed or women of all ages and how they affect him. Seidel is focused on the job of living, though the metaphysics of mortality is ever present, and as in ""Snow,"" a short and tender poem, "Snow is what it does. / It falls and it stays and it goes. / It melts and it is here somewhere. / We all will get there."

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Starred review from November 16, 2020
This selected, spanning half a century, demonstrates that Seidel’s renegade candor has only sharpened with age. With an erudite lexicon, staccato and ambling vignettes, and a frequently debonair tone, Seidel’s poems combine the sensibilities of the Greatest Generation and the Beats. They document a lust for life through a blunt and sensual dreamscape punctuated by labyrinthine conceits. The speaker’s carnal appetite is balanced with Romantic sentiments, “Your eyes gazed/ Sparkling and dark as hooves,/ They had seen you through languor and error./ They were so still. They were a child./ They were wet like hours/ And hours of cold rain.” Elsewhere, lust is intertwined with subservient reverence and theatrics: “You look like a field of flowers./ You look like flowers in a vase./ You look like brains and breasts./ You act like life stabbing death to death.” This book offers a slice of Seidel’s life: the amorous, the dark, the indulgent, and the restless mind captured by a master of craft.