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“... Now and again, I feel a throb Passing through my body like a sob, Which is both painless and of no consequence, Like a wave washing up on a beach, But which feels like or prompts the thought It may be the beginning of a stroke, But probably it is just the irregular heartbeat Of atrial fibrillation (AFib) Or starting up a reluctant motorcycle. The word throb makes it sound As if it had to do with sex ...”

“... she complies, only to reveal that she is wearing a vampire mask under it. My recent interview with Frederick Seidel, ostensibly for the Village Voice, was marginally less successful than this. In keeping with his perverse ways, Seidel agreed to answer only two questions. One of my questions ponderously involved the ...”

“... an agnostic – what a modern poem can do, I would show them something by Lawrence Joseph, or Frederick Seidel, or Karen Solie, all different but all modern, all modo hodie, all fresh today. A poem of Solie’s is sentences in unpredictable but deep sequence in unpredictable but braced lines. It seems out of control, but isn’t; it exhibits grace ...”

“... of the sense of identity’ than saying them so well. Subjectivity is more of a chosen theme in Frederick Seidel’s poetry, its treatment more varied, though certain images are clearly favourites. A raised hand, for instance, appears in almost exactly the same terms in different poems about departure and death. ‘To My Friend Anne ...”

“... to make connections where I can – the knuckleduster’s now my paperweight! Men and Woman is Frederick Seidel’s first appearance from an English publisher. American readers know his two books of poetry, Final Solutions (1963) and Sunrise (1980). The new book is a rather abstemious affair, a slim volume containing 21 poems from Sunrise, nine ...”

“... reviewers; and, predictably, what frustrated the later ones. In the New York Review of Books, Frederick Seidel damned the book as ‘hysterically overwritten, desperate to show how brilliant it is, a fatiguing endless succession of arrestingly clever similes to describe personalities and situations, similes, similes, cleverness, cleverness’. All ...”

“... but I’m sure this isn’t true. To illustrate his thesis he quotes appreciatively a poem by Frederick Seidel which includes the line: ‘I ride the cosmos on my poetry Ducati, Big Bang engine, einsteinium forks.’ This is a bad metaphor, because deliberately far-fetched. It doesn’t say to its readers: ‘Notice this relationship between poetry ...”

“... translucent charm, O’Hara’s cunning innocence, the rigorous spleen of Geoffrey Hill and Frederick Seidel: all of these qualities are alien, if not anathema, to Duncan’s mature work. There’s no question Duncan wrote a number of poems worth remembering, several of which (‘Often I Am Permitted’, ‘A Poem Beginning with a Line by ...”

“... suggested as the presiding influences or guides to the volume. In his Paris Review interview with Frederick Seidel, Lowell suggests that his true competitors are the likes of Salinger and Bellow. ‘The ideal modern form,’ he even says, ‘seems to be the novel and certain short stories.’ Working from prose, and a compatibility with prose – the ...”