So What

A bristling, invigorating new collection from the eminent American poet

Frederick Seidel declares ‘I’m not as old as I used to be. / I’m 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 Seidel’s work has never been the place to find them. Instead, he offers something else we also need: poems that won’t let us look away.’ New York Times

‘Genuinely outrageous . . . he prizes uncomfortable truth-telling and has a blasé 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.’ TLS

‘So 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 Tamás, Guardian best recent poetry