Hugh Seidman

One of his differences from others is in the measure and quality of his discipline, which does not find its expression in conventional modes, since it is a discipline of risks, like adventuring in space....His yearning for form, his need to organize and illuminate experience, is matched by his gravitation toward chaos.
--Stanley Kunitz
from the introduction to COLLECTING EVIDENCE

Twenty years after their publication, the anguish of these poems remains immediate, absolute...I know few collections so lacking in complacency, so adament in their refusal to charm or console, so fiercely intelligent.
--Louise Glück
The Village Voice

But the decaying metropolis, with its explosive "inner core," was bound to produce a poet, and finally it did ...He used the language of science with as much casual authority as the young Auden forty years before.
--Selden Rodman
100 American Poems

In selecting for the Yale Series of Younger Poets one of the best books by any American poet in recent years, editor Stanley Kunitz has revivified this series.
--Bill Zavatsky
The New York Times

COLLECTING EVIDENCE is Hugh Seidman's first book and a very good performance.
--Denis Donoghue
The New York Review of Books

This is an extrodinary first book, and in its length and complexity it makes us want to read more.
--Frank MacShane
Poetry

COLLECTING EVIDENCE won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and was published as Volume 65 in that series by the Yale University Press.

TALE OF GENJI

In Murasaki's time
they wept at the sunsets

It was easy

               If you were the Prince
               & in love

Calligraphy could do it

                                The total life
                                in the nuance of a line

& later

          The sun that had changed

The cold light defining shadow
Poetry leading nowhere

Occurrence made meaningless
The injustice of history

Not that it mattered

                            Or the light
                            they wept at


--From COLLECTING EVIDENCE

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COLLECTING EVIDENCE is currently out of print.