Who is the best American poet writing today? Though the news will not be welcome to prize juries, literary philanthropists, and the people who choose the poems for the subway, I think it may be Frederick Seidel. There is a reason why Mr. Seidel, whose first book was published more than 40 years ago, has not accumulated the cargo of honors that turn so many poets his age into mere worthies: no Pulitzer, no National Book Award. Indeed, if you go to the “about the author” section of Mr. Seidel’s new Web site, you will find no curriculum vitae at all. Instead, Mr. Seidel offers a clipping from a 1962 issue of the New York Times, about the controversy that resulted when a panel of poets chose his first collection, “Final Solutions,” for the 92nd Street Y’s inaugural poetry prize. Though the judges included Robert Lowell, the sponsor refused to publish the book, on the grounds that it libeled a living person.

That the article, and the Web site, are silent about who Mr. Seidel had allegedly defamed; that the poet, even at the age of 23, was considered too dangerous for official endorsement; that Mr. Seidel still, 44 years later, chooses to introduce himself to the world with this enigmatic scandal — all this is unsettling in a truly Seidelian fashion, and gives the reader a good sense of what to expect from his poetry. Mystification and outrage are still Mr. Seidel’s most effective tools, and he has seldom employed them to better effect than in his new book, “Ooga-Booga” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 101 pages, $24).The title itself — a parody of a threat, something the monster under the bed might grunt — manages to capture the weird dialectic of Mr. Seidel’s black comedy: He is scary, but funny, but still scary. Take these lines from the poem that opens the book, “Kill Poem”:

They really are everywhere.
They crawl around in one’s intimate hair.
They spread disease and despair.
They rape and pillage
In the middle of Sag Harbor Village.
They ferry Lyme disease.
The hunters’ guns brings them to their knees.

Only in the last two lines does it become clear that the poet is talking about deer and their ticks, and that the poem’s title refers to killing animals in a hunt. But even then, the disproportion between the helpless targets of “the hunters’ guns” and the way Mr. Seidel describes them makes the poem seem almost mad — a paranoiac’s ode to trespass and infection. The full-on, almost childish rhymes, combined with the uneven line lengths, give the verse the air of a mangled nursery story, or something Lear’s Fool might improvise during a night on the heath.

That Mr. Seidel’s dark night takes place in much plusher surroundings has always been part of his ambiguous appeal. Sag Harbor is just one of the rich and fashionable New York locales pressed into service in “Ooga-Booga”: We also spot the poet in Barney’s and the bar of the Carlyle Hotel, not to mention in Paris, Milan, and Singapore. The bilious self-portrait he offers in “On Being Debonair” seems factual enough in its details:

I use myself up being fine while I dine.
I am a result of the concierge of the Carlyle.
I order a bottle of Bordeaux.
I am a boulevard of elegance
In my well-known restaurants.

No American poet since James Merrill has written about such a materially privileged existence. But in Merrill’s verse, wealth is mainly kept in the background, the upholstery that cushions the poet’s idealistic pursuit of beauty and friendship. It is not clear just where Mr. Seidel’s money comes from, but he does not write about it in the delicately aristocratic style of the heir to the Merrill Lynch millions. Instead, he turns his luxuries into dark fetishes, none more so than the Ducati motorcycles he loves to ride and has often written about. Several poems in “Ooga-Booga” are about a “Superbike” he is having custommade at the Ducati factory in Bologna. This would seem self-indulgent, were Mr. Seidel not able to make his poems as erotically reckless as the bike itself:

I bought the racer
To replace her.
It became my slave and
I its.
All it lacked was tits. All it lacked
Between its wheels was hair.
I don’t care.
We do it anyway.

The unstable, self-mocking charge in these lines is only compounded by the title of the poem: “Dante’s Beatrice.” The most sublime love in literature is equated with the most mechanical, consumerist lust, in such a way that you are not sure if the joke is on Dante or on Mr. Seidel.

Lust, in fact, is Mr. Seidel’s great theme, and few poets have written better or more honestly about the way desire dehumanizes both its subject and its object. The sight of an old, rich, successful man with a beautiful young woman is hardly novel, in life or in literature — 21st-century New York is no less mercenary, in its way, than Balzac’s Paris — but no poet since John Berryman has made us feel its absurdity as movingly as Mr. Seidel does. “Sex got me buzzing like a bee / With Parkinson’s!” he writes, that exclamation point like a self-administered dagger. Coming from this poet, a poem called “Organized Religion” could only be about sex:

God looks up to His creation by dint of lying on the floor.
God lies there on His back on the carpet and looks. That’s what you are for.
Hike your skirt up higher. There is nothing higher or more
Than Him you stand over and adore!

The revelations and disclosures in “Ooga-Booga” get much more explicit than that, and they extend from the sexual to the political (in a sequence called “The Bush Administration”) and finally, fundamentally, the existential. “Open the mummy case of this text respectfully. / You find no one inside,” Mr. Seidel writes in valediction at the end of the book. This sounds like a defiance of confessional sincerity, and indeed, the tame earnestness of second-rate confessional poetry is at the furthest imaginable remove from Mr. Seidel’s protean playfulness. But you would have go back to confessional masters like Lowell and Berryman to find poetry as daringly self-revealing, as risky and compelling, as the best of Frederick Seidel’s.

akirsch@nysun.com