<div><b>"You Can't Like Seidel's Poems--They're Deliberately Virulent; You Can Only Gasp At Their Skill And Daring, Their Sickening Warp, Their Mercilessness."*</b><br><br>Frederick Seidel's highly acclaimed<i> Cosmos Trilogy </i>is a triple thunderclap of darkness from the poet whom Richard Poirier has recently called "the true heir of Walt Whitman" and of whose first book Robert Lowell wrote "[I] suspect the possibilities of modern poetry have been changed. Here is power that strikes." Reversing the course of Dante's <i>Divine Comedy</i>, Seidel's trilogy begins in the heavens, with <i>The Cosmos Poems</i>, and descends, passing through the Purgatorio of <i>Life on Earth</i> to arrive in Manhattan in <i>Area Code 212</i>.<br></div>