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.