Seidel seems to have been testing the premises and the ordinary language of poetry [in the intervening years between his first book, Final Solutions (1963), and his second, Sunrise (1979)]. He has also been attending to our various national crazes. The result is an extremely savvy book of poems, reminiscent of Lowell as social prophet, but without the latter's deep moral affiliations. Mailer and Didion also come to mind, for Seidel is something of an Aquarian reporter letting us know how it is with the beautiful and the damned.

Seidel prefers the camera's cool gaze to verbal rhapsody—Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the book's dedicatees. The series of California poems which open Sunrise have an iciness and detachment perfectly rendered in the image of flight of "The Room and the Cloud."… [Seidel's] less successful pieces verge on a kind of "designer" poetry with the names of jet-set friends sewn...