Two collections by poets ageing disgracefully
GODDAMNED SELECTED POEMS STANLEY MOSS 208pp. Carcanet. £16.99.
SO WHAT Poems
FREDERICK SEIDEL 160pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $27.
STANLEY MOSS, ninety-nine this month, and Frederick Seidel, eighty-eight, aren’t ageing gracefully. True, the two Americans acknowledge in their poems that they have new griefs, discomforts and embarrassments in their lives now, as well as memories of the horrors of the past century. True too that the well-travelled, well-connected lives they’ve led enable them to write A-list elegy and reminiscence: W. H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Stanley Kunitz and Jane Freilicher for Moss; Ezra Pound, Robert Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein and Bernardo Bertolucci for Seidel. But both are pleasure-loving poets, whether in their unfussy enjoyment of rhyme and metre or their delight in food, drink and sex: “Give me a death like the Buddha’s. / Let me fall / over from eating mushrooms Provençal”, Moss declares in “Prayer”, adding “may I succumb / tumbling into a rosebush after a love / half my age”.
For all Moss’s blasphemies, his hymns to bodily apertures and fluids, for all his self-identification as a satyr, his doubt and disbelief, Moss is, in lamentation or celebration, a species of religious poet. His Goddamned Selected Poems, as much a twenty-firstcentury collection as a greatest hits, flits from monotheism to polytheism, from confronting the Judaism of Moss’s upbringing to contemplating Buddhism and Christianity, making a fresh sacredness out of the profane. His God encompasses “idols with many arms / [...] rain kept sacred by faithful summer grasses, / fat Buddha and lean Christ”. However nominally transgressive Moss appears to be, he is out to embrace his readers, not to goad them. Easily and unaffectedly sharing his life, times and knowledge of the culture, history and ancient history of three continents, Moss is good, thought-provoking company.
Seidel – “I don’t believe in God. I believe in fun” – is genuinely outrageous. The title poem and opener of his new collection, So What, starts as a jingle for a Mayfair gunsmith. On encountering “There’s nothing on earth as beautiful as a Purdey /Over-and-Under, or as urbane, or as insane, / Except Volodymyr Zelenskyy, / The incredible president of Ukraine”, those readers not convulsed with laughter may be hurling the book into the recycling. Those who read on, though, will discover the poem broadening into post-truth presentations of Russian culture and expansionism, the value of poetry and Seidel’s own appetite for destruction.
Seidel remains, at his core, what he started out as: a protégé of Lowell and contemporary of Sylvia Plath. Like them, he prizes uncomfortable truthtelling and has a blasé attitude to accepted
