THE COSMOS POEMS

This limited-edition collection of verse and pictures was commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History in New

York to inaugurate and celebrate its new planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Seidel, the author of several previous books of poetry, contributes 33 new poems to this effort. They are accompanied by Anselm Kiefer's full-color lithographs. Seidel has clearly done his homework and knows the lingo peculiar to astrophysics and quantum mechanics: he speaks of the original 11-dimensional space-time and the massless spin-2 particle, but his insertion of these clunky terms into poetic stanzas is often awkward. At other times he's given to rhapsodic verse such as "I like the speed of light." (Good thing, too. It's the law in these parts.) In between is a handful of enjoyable poems, like "Supersymmetry" and "Morning of the Universe," that express childish delight and awe at the marvelous workings of the universe, poems that present concrete images of Planet Earth rather than intergalactic abstractions. In how many ways can a poet be expected to metaphorically describe the Big Bang in a faux enfant voice without repeating himself? And after seeing a half-dozen pictures of planets superimposed upon pictures of galaxies, how interesting a departure are the next ten going to be? A better method for commissioning such a work might have been to elicit poems and pictures from a number of poets and artists. Unless a gravitational anomaly is likely to cause your coffee-table to float away into space, you aren't likely to need or want

such an expensive tome.