These poems are the harshly earned clarities of a survivor. There are no facts or feelings more relevant.
--Robert Creeley Hugh Seidman is the American poet whose work is closest to Trilce by César Vallejo, the greatest of South American poets.
--David Ignatow Hugh Seidman is unmistakably a poet, one of our best--fine, uncompromising, fierce.
--Stanley Kunitz His poems are unerring tributes to the life force, verbally honed to the precise nerve of the issue. ...This man's poetry, like the humanity mirrored within it, is built to last.
--The Kansas City Star Hugh Seidman is a superb poet. ...One cheers every perfectly chisled line. When Seidman hits his stride, he burns like a star. --Publisher's Weekly |
Throne / Falcon / Eye![]() EMBARKMENT
Is this yet to be the freight of Claude Lorraine The gold of Sheba for a king's ennui before his thousand wives and concubines across the archaic night sea Is this yet to be the anachronous Greek cartoon calipered to the columns' groove Are these sunbursts yet to be the blind scalpels that would sign below the breasts of the fleshed sky to fit the heart into the body to survive O surely I do not like to care or to not care that the passage of the soul takes on some second-rate nubile queen Although I do not seem to turn the blade from the prose of these rapes and revulsions Perhaps it is how steel must remember the vein or how sleep must unwind the bandages of the Pharaohs who refuse to die unclaimed as the shadows on their stones But is this yet to be the reply to the body drugged under the dawn as if alive as the clouds ride slowly through the rooms Is this yet to be the verdict under the ductile beams That a slave must be chained into the ribs to beat like the heart of the figurehead whose nipples spread the waves of that sea That a rower must sweat under the sun's day in the hold so that she can sail in the dream on the dream of that sea ___________________________________ THRONE / FALCON / EYE was originally published by Random House. To order directly from the author, click title in the "TO ORDER" column. |
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