Publisher's Synopsis
Peter Seidman's subject matter is the ineffable: the hidden forces that drive existence and confound ordinary thought, the essences of relationships that can't be put into words. And yet his poems reach for the extraordinary through powerful evocations of ordinary sense experience, as if to suggest that the elusive is visible if we know how to look. The juxtaposition of paintings and drawings by Paul Widess visually enlivens the poetry while creating an atmosphere all their own. Many images are inspired directly from the specific poems they illustrate. Some images resulted from the general presence of the poetry combined with whatever was happening in the artist's environment.
Which Side of the Bed is organized chronologically, picking up the poet in his twenties, concluding fifty years later. Second, believing quality and appeal all depend on which side of the bed one arose from on any given day, this book is a collection of poems that personally appeal to the poet, with hopes that his readers experience some of the same emotive power Peter Seidman felt in selecting them.
