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These are the collected poems of a master whose work includes many of the most compelling, savage, and tender poems in the language. Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, "the best American poet writing today." Frederick Seidel's books of poetry include "Final Solutions"; "Sunrise," winner of the Lamont Prize and the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award; "These Days"; "My Tokyo"; "Going Fast"; "Area Code 212"; "Life on Earth"; and "The Cosmos Poems." He received the 2002 PEN/Voelker Award for Poetry. These are the collected poems of a master whose work includes many of the most compelling, savage, and tender poems in the language. Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, "the best American poet writing today." "Many poets have been acquainted with the night; some have been intimate with it; and a handful have been so haunted and intoxicated by the darker side of existence that it can be hard to pick them out from the murk that surrounds them. As "Poems 1959-2009" demonstrates, Frederick Seidel has spent the last half-century being that darkest and strangest sort of poet . . . Seidel's work] has only gotten better as he's gotten older, regardless of who or what has been paying attention to him . . . This combination of barbarity and grace is one of Seidel's most remarkable technical achievements: he's like a violinist who pauses from bowing expertly through Paganini's "Caprice No. 24" to smash his instrument against the wall . . . When people claim to be 'shocked' by Seidel's work, it's not the actual content that disturbs them--if you've seen "28 Weeks Later," you've seen worse--but rather these strange juxtapositions of artful and dreadful."--David Orr, "The New York Times Book Review" "Many poets have been acquainted with the night; some have been intimate with it; and a handful have been so haunted and intoxicated by the darker side of existence that it can be hard to pick them out from the murk that surrounds them. As "Poems 1959-2009" demonstrates, Frederick Seidel has spent the last half-century being that darkest and strangest sort of poet. He is, it's widely agreed, one of poetry's few truly scary characters. This is a reputation of which he's plainly aware and by which he's obviously amused, at least to judge from the nervy title of his 2006 book, "Ooga-Booga." This perception also colors the praise his collections typically receive--to pick one example from many, Calvin Bedient admiringly describes him as 'the most frightening American poet ever, ' which is a bit like calling someone 'history's most bloodthirsty clockmaker.' What is it about Seidel that bothers and excites everyone so much? The simplest answer is that he's an exhilarating and unsettling writer who is very good at saying things that can seem rather bad . . . Seidel is published by a major house and has enjoyed long, smart, immensely positive write-ups in at least three general-interest magazines--a grim fate for which most poets would happily sacrifice their children and possibly even their cats. Of course, none of this has much to do with Seidel's actual work, which has only gotten better as he's gotten older, regardless of who or what has been paying attention to him . . . This combination of barbarity and grace is one of Seidel's most remarkable technical achievements: he's like a violinist who pauses from bowing expertly through Paganini's "Caprice No. 24" to smash his instrument against the wall . . . When people claim to be 'shocked' by Seidel's work, it's not the actual content that disturbs them--if you've seen "28 Weeks Later," you've seen worse--but rather these strange juxtapositions of artful and dreadful. This is probably the reason he reminds some readers of Philip Larkin, with whom he otherwise has little in common. The anger that often motivates Larkin's rapid shifts in diction and tone becomes in Seidel a rage that can destabilize the poem entirely. If anything, Seidel, born in 1936, has become less mellow as he's aged. A sampling of lines from the new poems gathered here under the title 'Evening Man: ' 'I make her oink' (in reference to sex); 'My face had been sliced off / And lay there on the ground like a washcloth'; 'And the angel of the Lord came to Mary and said: / You have cancer. / Mary could not think how. / No man had been with her.' This is grim stuff, even when meant to be amusing. But what prevents Seidel's work from being simply grotesque or decadent--what makes it, in fact, anything but grotesque or decadent--is his connection to the larger political universe. Adam Kirsch has observed that 'among contemporary poets, it is Seidel's social interest that is really unusual.' This is exactly right, and the "nature" of Seidel's social interest makes his work interesting in ways that the work of his closest peer, Sylvia Plath, often is not. Seidel and Plath are our most talented devotees of psychic violence, but whereas Plath co-opts the outside world to make her own obsessions burn hotter ('my skin, / Bright as a Nazi lampshade'), Seidel occupies a more ambiguous territory. He's as likely to be possessed by events as to possess them ('Rank as the odor in urine / Of asparagus from the night before, / This is empire waking drunk, and remembering in the dark'). To be fair, Plath died young; no one knows how her work may have changed. Still, if the Plath we know is Lady Lazarus, the figure Seidel resembles most is the sin-eater, that old, odd and possibly apocryphal participant in folk funerals in Scotland and Wales. In the late 17th century, the Englishman John Aubrey described sin-eating like so: 'When the Corps was brought out of the house, and layd on the Biere, a Loafe of Breade was brought out, and delivered to the Sinne-eater over the Corps . . . in consideration whereof he tooke upon him (ipso facto) all of the Sinnes of the Defunct, and freed him (or her) from walking after they were dead.' In Aubrey's telling, the sin-eaters were p