Frederick Seidel’s New Selected Poems reproduces poems from his first volume Sunrise published in 1980, through to his last volume Peaches Goes it Alone, published in 2018. That’s some 260-odd pages for a career that’s lasted forty years, with fifteen individual collections and two other Selecteds. Inevitably, perhaps, the first volumes of such a fluent career are more pared than the later ones. Even from the beginning, there is in Seidel’s work an enviable combination of observation and imagination. That combination in the early writing throws up a kind of Dali-esque surrealism, in which there is striking visual detail, with a grasping for juxtaposition.

Seidel’s first book, Sunrise, contains the long title poem, which begins, ‘The gold watch that retired free will was constant dawn, / Constant sunrise. But then it was dawn. Christ rose, / White-faced gold bulging the horizon / Like too much honey in a spoon, an instant / Stretching forever that would not spill’, and actually the sentence does not end there. Such writing seems to seek interpretation; that the ‘gold watch’ is a symbol of retirement from work that offered the free will that was ‘retired’ with the watch’s acquisition. Then, there is a turnaround conjunction ‘but’ which, coupled with ‘then’, suggests a different kind of ‘dawn’, i.e. one that rises with the coming of Christ. That coming, in turn, seems to offer eternity. And there is a lot more of this, in ways which seem to nod towards autobiography located both around the world and in various times, the details piled one against another. And, suitably perhaps, the poem ...