The Cosmos Trilogy

"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 .