9780374105815

Book Description: FARRAR STRAUS GIROUX, 2002. Hardback. Book Condition: New. 222 x 140 mm. Brand New Book with Free Worldwide Delivery. Area Code 212 is the journey's end in ice and flames of Seidel's brilliant Cosmos Poems trilogy. Reversing the order and outlook of Dante's Divine Comedy, Seidel's three-book series begins in the heavens (with The Cosmos Poems) and then descends steeply--through the Purgatory of Life on Earth, the second volume--to at last arrive at home, in Manhattan, with its famous area code. Frederick Seidel's previous books of poems include Final Solutions; Sunrise, winner of the Lamont Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; These Days; Poems, 1959-1979; My Tokyo; Going Fast; The Cosmos Poems, and Life on Earth. Area Code 212 is the journey's end in ice and flames of Seidel's brilliant Cosmos Poems trilogy. Reversing the order and outlook of Dante's Divine Comedy, Seidel's three-book series begins in the heavens (with The Cosmos Poems) and then descends steeply—through the Purgatory of Life on Earth, the second volume—to at last arrive at home, in Manhattan, with its famous area code. Here is the concluding volume in Seidel's acclaimed Cosmos Poems trilogy. "The concluding 'Inferno' volume of Seidel's Cosmos Poems trilogy is dark, labyrinthine. The thirty-three poems each consist of eight metered, occasionally rhymed quatrains, yet this harmonious formal structure houses complex poeticized thought processes involving abrupt allusions (both literary and biblical), oddly juxtaposed images, arresting questions, snippets of gallows humor, private symbols, and oblique declarations. The reader must ponder as deeply what has seemingly been torn away from these poems—transition-assisted 'arguments' linking image to image, idea to idea, and aiming at a conclusion—as what remains so imposingly, alarmingly, jagged . . . These poems alert, make the reader see hard, think hard. And for all their parody and derision, they are profoundly spiritual."—John Taylor, The Antioch Review"Frederick Seidel has won several important poetry prizes but is hardly a brand name among poets. He has none of the visibility or easy-listening manner of, say, Billy Collins. But he may be the most astringent chronicler of our times. In Area Code 212, which completes his Cosmos Poems trilogy, Seidel reports from Manhattan, home of the palindromic area code. Whereas Dante's Divine Comedy begins in Hell and ends in Heaven, Seidel's trilogy begins in the heavens (The Cosmos Poems, 2000), travels through purgatory (Life on Earth, 2001), and descends, in the new book, to the living hell of a Manhattan 'killed' on 9/11/01 . . . Seidel likes word play, slant and internal rhymes, riddles, and definitions. At times he employs the absurd to reflect our times . . . Out of the ashes of Word War I, T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land, in London. The new 'Unreal City' is New York, out of whose 9/11 ashes Seidel writes the supreme Area Code 212, our new Waste Land, as monitory and radical for 2002 as Eliot's poem was in 1922. Eliot never won a Pulitzer, but Seidel should win the next one."—George Held, The Philadelphia Inquireri0"These [poems are] coldblooded recitations of postures toward, feelings about, and descriptions of a world in love with itself and with money and violence."—Publishers Weekly"Many of the poems here initially appeared in the Wall Street Journal as a poetic series on months of the year, and this temporal framework provides the basic structure of the work. Frustrated love provides the other unifying theme, as the poet offers graphic poems on 'Venus' and 'Dido with Dildo' to illustrate his 'love life here in hell.' The poems are not so much verbal statements as verbal performances of emotional states--rage, despair, wonder, and a certain playfulness. Seidel delights in colloquial speech and arresting metaphors: 'The poem he was writing put / Its arms around his neck.' He likes to scramble history and geography, at one point juxtaposing Groucho Marx and the Taj Mahal. In the manner of all good poets, Seidel reconfi. Bookseller Inventory # FLT9780374105815

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