Michael Robbins writes:

Seidel is, as everyone notices, a terrifying poet, and the garish new edition of his collected poems is a terrifying record of unembarrassed privilege. If you can think of a taboo, Seidel violates it somewhere in this book. ‘Mr Delicious’, one of the new poems gathered at the beginning of the volume under the title ‘Evening Man’, is characteristic of Seidel’s perspective:

I stick my heart on a stick
To toast it over the fire.
It’s the size of a marshmallow.
It bubbles and blackens to
Campfire goo –
Burnt-black skin outside
Gooey Jew.
From the 20th century’s
24/7 chimneys, choo-choo-
Train puffs of white smoke rise.
The trains waddle full of cattle to the camps.
The weightless puffs of smoke are on their way to the sky.
Ovens cremate fields of human cow.
Ovens cremate fields of human snow.

One has to go back to Sylvia Plath, born just a few years before Seidel, to find such nose-thumbing at atrocity.

(LRB 6 August 2009)

Farrar Straus | hardback 509 pp. |ISBN: 9780374126551