Going Fast

Seidel's speakers talk excitedly of dying astronauts, ""A Vampire in the Age of AIDS,"" expensive motorcycles, Yitzhak Rabin, bulls in bullfights and God. They are audacious to a fault: ""I would like to strip/ You and whip you till I see Stars and Bars,/ O big American Beauty"" is just one of many such declarations. While Seidel's lust in action can be surreally comic (""My penis is full of blood for you/ Probably won't win her hand""), it more often treats words the way it treats women, with showy brutality: ""The murderer has been injecting her remorselessly/ with succinylcholine..../ A woman has the right to bare arms."" Ovid's story of Myrrha's incest (so well-retold by Frank Bidart) gets, here, a slapdash, foreshortened treatment, including the invocation ""Muse, put your breast in my mouth/ If you want me to sing./ (Fuck the muse.)"" It can be hard to tell when Seidel is kidding. Going Fast extends, or caricatures, the confrontational ease of earlier books (Final Solutions; My Tokyo, etc.), but the poems are now less made things than performances, effusions of that shockingly masculine globetrotter, ""Fred Seidel"": ""A rich American sadist had handcuffs made at Hermes/ To torture with beauty the Duchesse d'Uzes./ A cow looking at the understated elegance would know/ Simplicity as calm as this was art."" Ordinary readers may cherish their doubts. (Apr.)