Frederick Seidel

Judges’ Citation

Frederick Seidel’s work reminds us that it is not poetry’s job to reassure, to confirm expectations and habits of thought.

Frederick Seidel’s work reminds us that it is not poetry’s job to reassure, to confirm expectations and habits of thought. Its beauty is often difficult and its pleasures complicated and unnerving. Violent, scary, uncomfortably funny and ferociously sad, angry, mourning, or in love, the poems’ brutal honesty of intellect and instinct is written with wicked, magnificent control. And always, they are utterly human. Morality is never excused from the mess of politics and culture. ‘Civilized is about having stuff,’ writes Seidel. ‘Too much is almost enough.’ Addressing privilege and complicity in the first person, the poems know that for all that is acquired, somebody, or something, pays. ‘The American trophies covered in tears that deck the American halls’ dog the boutique hotels, shadowing corners of those poems in which ‘We lived like hummingbirds on nectar and oxygen.’ Ooga-Booga places in uneasy proximity images and statements that, in the discomfort of the other’s glare, reveal their underpinnings and implications. Its poems refuse complacency and the inertia of despair, whether from trajectories of loss, war, movies, hunting, cocktails at the Carlyle or superbike racing. It bids us take a look at our own affairs. Seidel has written a startling, haunting book. Its risks are both its challenge and reward.