OOGA-BOOGA. By Frederick Seidel. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) Having delivered his fin-de-siècle masterpiece, “The Cosmos Trilogy,” in 2003, Seidel could certainly be forgiven for taking it easy this next time out, but he needn’t be cut any slack: these new poems are as beguiling and magisterial as anything the septuagenarian jet-setter has written. I can’t decide whether Seidel has more in common with Philip Larkin or John Ashbery, but the fact that he can prompt such a bizarre question is more revealing than any possible answer. Like Larkin, Seidel can seem a gimlet-eyed grouch whose compassion oozes to the surface despite himself, as in “A Fresh Stick of Chewing Gum,” a denunciation-cum-celebration of youth that concludes with a pensive “blank” nearly identical to the “nowhere” near the end of Larkin’s similarly arch “High Windows.” And like Ashbery, Seidel takes nearly pathological delight in the musical flotsam and jetsam of contemporary usage: “I’m getting young. / I’m totally into strapping on the belt of dynamite / Which will turn me into light. / God is great! I suck Her tongue.” Another poet might have thought to begin a stanza with the line “The most expensive hotel in the world ignites,” but probably only this one would follow it with “As many orgasms as there are virgins in paradise.” I hope Seidel wears a helmet while riding his beloved Ducati; it would be intolerable to see this great strange brain spilled.
JOEL BROUWER

From NY Times last sunday