Frederick Seidel's America is authentically a punished land. His poems [in "Sunrise"] are ruminations on the night before the last in Gomorrah; many are the best about hell written in this country. Loosely speaking, his subject is the 1960's and what's left of them, but he travels far for analogies, and the personalities he introduces invariably smell of sadness and death….

Mr. Seidel's diction is alternatively urbane, scathing, frenetic; his visionary glimpses of Manhattan are balefully superb and in certain poems, such as "The Trip," the Magritte-like hallucinations are compelling. But his title poem, "Sunrise," 40 enigmatic stanzas that proceed by way of extreme elision, cross-cutting and parenthetical asides of a private nature, is tangled territory and may not yield its coherence after a dozen readings. Yet the more explicit Mr. Seidel becomes, the less interesting he is likely to be: Opulent polemic gives way to sentimental tribute, as...