My Tokyo: Poems

In his fifth book, Seidel ( Final Solutions ) presents a moral landscape balanced delicately between history and the self: ``I listen to the music / Nine years before 2000,'' he notes in ``Stroke.'' The poet writes to locate himself and his readers in a world where ``Stalin isn't a psychosomatic disorder,'' and where ``The homeless homeless have / The center strip of Broadway. / To live where you should jump.'' His best poems have a taut and unusual richness. In ``The Death of Meta Burden in an Avalanche,'' Seidel draws on many sources for his images; they mirror his lines in the poem: ``Everything / Fits my body perfectly now that I'm about to disappear.'' In ``Untitled'' the language of the day helps us to understand his vision of loss--the phrase ``Senator, I have no memory of that'' occupies the same poem as ``Nothing could ever be the same after the Zapruder film / Of the Dallas motorcade.'' The poetry that moves us least points to a personal exhaustion. The whole of ``The'' reads: ``The poem as a human torch. I burn. Burns out.'' An intelligence so at ease in verse is less persuasive in the wisdom of its despairs, however graphic: ``I am a toupee walking toward me,'' Seidel writes in one poem, ``With no one under it.'' We believe more completely in him in ``The Ritz, Paris,'' where ``A mirror catches him by surprise / With an old man's buttocks.'' (June)