The New York Times Book Review, Albert Mobilio
As an attempt to merge poetic meditation and scientific speculation, it is both earnest and user-friendly.


Adam Phillips, Raritan
"Every word [of Seidel's poems] works, and every false note seems calculated."


Book Description
New poems from the author of Going Fast, with original illustrations by Anselm Kiefer. A can of shaving cream inflates A ping-pong ball of lather, Thick, hot, smaller than an atom, soon The size of the world. This does take time to happen. Back at the start Again, a pinprick swells so violently It shoots out Hallways to other worlds, But keeps expanding Till it is all There is. The universe is all there is. --from "Mirror Full of Stars" The Cosmos Poems were commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History to inaugurate and celebrate their new planetarium, which will open in the year 2000. This limited edition is signed by the author.


About the Author
Frederick Seidel's previous books of poems are Final Solutions; Sunrise, winner of the Lamont Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; These Days; Poems 1959-1979; My Tokyo (FSG, 1993); and Going Fast (FSG, 1998). He lives in New York City.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Poems from the author of Going Fast.

A can of shaving cream inflates A ping-pong ball of lather, Thick, hot, smaller than an atom, soon The size of the world.

This does take time to happen. Back at the start Again, a pinprick swells so violently It shoots out

Hallways to other worlds, But keeps expanding Till it is all There is. The universe is all there is. —from "Mirror Full of Stars"

The Cosmos Poems is about the universe: who it is, how it is, how it came to be, what is going to happen; when, why, who you are; what there was before it was; the smallness and the vastness, as told by a child to a child, in which quantum mechanics makes friends with special relativity forever. Frederick Seidel's poems tell the story.