Ooga-Booga [1st UK Edition] 9780571244089

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Frederick Seidel OogaBooga

‘Seidel grips the twentieth century between his teeth like a blade as he speaks. He is one of the more formidable poets of the last third of the century.’ Calvin Bedient, Poetry ‘You would have to go back to confessional masters like Lowell and Berryman to find poetry as daringly self-revealing, as risky and compelling, as the best of Frederick Seidel’s. Adam Kirsch, NewYork Sun

‘The poems in Ooga-Booga are the richest yet and read like no one else’s: they’re surreal, utterly unpretentious, and suffused with the peculiar American loneliness of Raymond Chandler. While I can think of a more likable book of poems, I can scarcely imagine a better one.’ Alex Halberstadt, New York magazine

‘Ooga-Booga is as beguiling and magisterial as anything Seidel has written. I can’t decide whether he has more in common with Philip Larkin or John Ashbery, but the fact that Seidel can prompt such a bizarre question is more revealing than any possible answer.’

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New York Times Book Review

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First published in the United States in 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 18 West 18th Street, New York, NY 1oorr First published in the United Kingdom in 2009 by Faber and Faber Limited Bloomsbury House 74-77 Great Russell Street London wc1B 3DA Printed in England by T. J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

All rights reserved © Frederick Seidel, 2006

The right of Frederick Seidel to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-0-571-24408-9

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Digitized by the Internet Archive In 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

httos://archive.org/details/oogabooga0000seid

CONTENTS

Kill Poem

From Nijinsky’s Diary Violin

Nectar

On Being Debonair Homage to Pessoa

For Holly Andersen Fog

A Red Flower Dick and Fred

New Year’s Day, 2004 The Italian Girl

The Big Golconda Diamond What Are Movies For? The Owl You Heard E-mail from an Owl White Butterflies The Castle in the Mountains

A Fresh Stick of Chewing Gum Dante’s Beatrice

Bologna Racer

vii

At a Factory in Italy

44

France for Boys

45

Grandson Born Dead

47

Death

49

East Hampton Airport

50

A White Tiger

52

Cloclo

54

Laudatio

56

To Die For

58

Barbados

60

Climbing Everest

65

Organized Religion

67

Mother Nature

69

Broadway Melody

74

Love Song

75

Breast Cancer

Viii

wives

78

Rilke

79

Casanova Getting Older

82

Il Duce

84

I Am Siam

85

The Big Jet

86

The Black-Eyed Virgins

87

Eurostar

88

Song: “The Swollen River Overthrows Its Banks”

89

Drinking in the Daytime

90

The Bush Administration

92

The Death of the Shah

96

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