A dual-review of 'Evening Man' and 'Ooga-Booga.'

Yet more evidence that honest reportage from the disaffected has more critical force than puritanical censorship: it's impossible to read this and feel anything but disgust for Seidel, his world (i.e., the ultra-rich), and the world surrounding that world, in which everything is for sale, for the purposes of sex and hedonism. He's a bit like Houllebecq, if Houllebecq was much smarter and a better writer, and was a poet, rather than a novelist with poetry on the side.

And formally, he's a breath of fresh air: none of your precise, non-rhythmic patter; no hesitation in throwing in cliched rhymes if they'll get the job done; willing to find the tunes in words from anywhere (bad pop song rhythm; good hip-hop rhythm; Eliotesque slides and so on). Where most poets seem to think sentences are either logocentric impositions on their own free spirit, or that syntax is for other people, Seidel makes do with almost Hemingway-levels of minimalism, as in this final stanza of 'Ode to Spring':

"I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface."

The poems in this book mostly avoid neat closure, as here, where a trimeter would have made more conventional sense; I found this frustrating, but of course, that's the point.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of reading 'Evening Man' and 'Ooga-Booga' back to back; the unvarying themes (which Seidel himself pokes fun at) aren't entirely saved by the varying forms, and by the end I was ready for something else. ( )

These poems are definitely not for the prudish or the fainthearted. Seidel's poems are raw, savage, fearless, with a lyrical beauty that makes the whole collection twisted. He writes about what horrifies many with musical bluntness. A wild ride from start to finish.

"While I can think of a more likable book of poems, I ca scarcely imagine a better one..." Alex Halberstadt, New York ( )

A compadre of mine got it just right: the most fruitful way to understand Frederick Seidel's poetry is "by seeing him as some kind of wealthy Roman patrician, commenting on the declining empire." The difference is that few Roman patricians (and probably, now that James Merrill is gone, no contemporary patricians other than Seidel) were as skillful with a pen, as witty, and as irreverent as this poet. Another way to understand Seidel might be to imagine what would have happened if Simon Raven actually were a patrician, and rich, and wrote poetry. This is a book to remind us how fun—and unsettling—poetry can be.