The Cosmos Trilogy - by Frederick Seidel (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

"You Can't Like Seidel's Poems--They're Deliberately Virulent; You Can Only Gasp At Their Skill And Daring, Their Sickening Warp, Their Mercilessness."*

Frederick Seidel's highly acclaimed Cosmos Trilogy is a triple thunderclap of darkness from the poet whom Richard Poirier has recently called "the true heir of Walt Whitman" and of whose first book Robert Lowell wrote "[I] suspect the possibilities of modern poetry have been changed. Here is power that strikes." Reversing the course of Dante's Divine Comedy, Seidel's trilogy begins in the heavens, with The Cosmos Poems, and descends, passing through the Purgatorio of Life on Earth to arrive in Manhattan in Area Code 212.

Review Quotes

"[Seidel] grips the twentieth century between his teeth like a blade as he speaks . . . One of the more formidable poets of the last third of the century." --Calvin Bedient, Poetry

"[Life on Earth] is an exemplary book, Seidel's best, and one of the best by an American poet in the past twenty years." --Michael Hofmann, The Times Literary Supplement

"Desperate [and] affecting...The poems of Area Code 212 do not aspire to be up-to-the-minute; for Seidel...there is no other way to be." --Robyn Creswell, The Nation

"Unafraid of being unacceptable, Seidel emerges as an oddity, one of the rare poets who, in retelling a tale from Ovid's Metamorphoses, can say, 'Fuck the muse, ' and still sing." --Brian Henry, The Threepenny Review

"The moral thrills of his poetry can be as daunting as the moral spills, the cruel intelligence of glamour as alluring as the mystical stillness that is somewhere also at the heart of his poetry . . . 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

"In an era that fancies itself particularly gender-tender, [this] poet doesn't pull his punches in accounts of encounters with women. His is a conspicuously male slant on matters of sexual engagement. As a woman, and more precisely as a woman alert to every stripe of lyric fire, I find myself more moved by Seidel's brutal, excruciated 'Recessional' . . . than by any of a thousand more conventional mournings. His work deserves more celebration than it gets." --Heather McHugh, Lingua Franca

About the Author

Frederick Seidel's previous books of poems include Final Solutions; Sunrise, These Days; Poems, 1959-1979; My Tokyo (FSG, 1993); Going Fast (FSG, 1998); The Cosmos Poems (FSG, 2000); and Life on Earth (FSG, 2001).