|
|
Article: Life on Earth. (Books).(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Antioch Review
- Article date:
- March 22, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Antioch Review, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Life on Earth by Frederick Seidel. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 68 pp., $22.00. The second book in Seidel's The Cosmos Poems, a trilogy-in-progress, Life on Earth sustains a unique voice--sardonic, sexually charged, syntactically condensed--throughout its vision of that middle ground between Paradise and Inferno. This territory includes "St. Louis, Missouri"--"You wait forever till you can't wait any longer--/ And then you're born"--in which a single life becomes eternity's culmination, as well as "Summer" in which an erotic dream or memory generates a Big Bang: "Kitsy" enters a room, and "The universe begins at once. / The stars erupt in a sky / They can be stars in." For ...