So What by Seidel, Frederick

Description

Author: Seidel, FrederickPoetryPublished on 14 August 2025 by FABER & FABER in the United Kingdom.Paperback | 152 pages197 x 130 x 13 | 186g
A bristling, invigorating new collection from the eminent American poetFrederick Seidel declares Im not as old as I used to be. / Im getting young. In So What, he speeds across the island of Manhattan on his racetrack-only Superbike, hurtling into the tenth decade of his life and the sixth decade of his extraordinary career. But the path from youth to old age has not been straightforward. With a disarming combination of acuity and playfulness, the poet confronts his vulnerability while using his artfulness as a form of subversion. Rather than contemplating a return to childlike innocence, he writes, I explode with rage and age. In doing so, he summons up a tidal surge full of shotguns and wristwatches, late-blooming love and sex, and stark glimpses of American life. At its crest stands the poet, looking over all this wreckage and creation, and he proclaims: so what.[A]s vigorous, insightful, moving and disturbing as his work has ever been . . . We need poets blessings, but Seidels work has never been the place to find them. Instead, he offers something else we also need: poems that wont let us look away. New York TimesGenuinely outrageous . . . he prizes uncomfortable truth-telling and has a blas attitude to accepted pieties and the causing of offence. He is a poet who links his compromised life and self to history, politics and the public sphere. TLSSo What energetically decries the spectre of death and the grinding indignities of illness and age facing the 89-year-old poet, while skewering the failures of the American empire and the west more widely . . . Seidel remains the toweringly enigmatic, ludic and at times offensive provocateur, yet his lyric abilities with image and line never lose their power Rebecca Tams, Guardian best recent poetry