Peaches Goes It Alone

‘Taking my cue from TS Eliot’s suggestion, back in modernism’s heyday, that poetry had to be difficult, it seems to me that poetry these days had better be funny. So I’m opting for Frederick Seidel’s Peaches Goes It Alone (Faber & Faber), with its gerontian lucidity and juvenile senility, its outrageousness, inventiveness and radical indifference to the idea of causing offence.’

‘The two books of poetry I most enjoyed this year were What I’m Looking For by Maureen N McLane (Penguin) and Peaches Goes It Alone by Frederick Seidel (Faber & Faber)...Seidel, the divisive bad-good poet, whose terrible-beautiful rhymes and offensive-tender sentiments will have you levitating one minute and on the floor with horror the next. I don’t smile often in these strange and anxious times, except when I read any poem by Seidel.’