Spaldeen - by Henry M Seiden (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

These poems, written over several decades but never published as a collection, are a kind of autobiography--an account of concerns drawn from my life both inside and outside of my consulting room.

I'm a psychologist and psychoanalyst. My consulting room is a renovated garage, now an airy office and studio, next door to my house in Forest Hills, New York. It locates the adult consciousness that gives rise to my professional work and to these poems. My childhood home in New York's West Bronx locates the early consciousness and the developing consciousness that is (as for all of us) the ground for everything that follows in adulthood.

Hence the title. "Spaldeen" is what we called the ubiquitous pink rubber ball we played with, the name a corruption of the trademark "Spalding" which soon wore off or got covered with grime. The spaldeen was at the center of the physical, social, and therefore the moral and psychological life of the kids who played on the streets and sidewalks of New York City.

As a psychotherapist and a poet, it's been my deepening experience that despite the obvious differences in aims, there's much alike in the two discourses. In each we try to find, to discover, language for making and shaping, for revealing, for pointing to and for altering meaning. As I sit in my office, the problem of getting the words right is much the same whether a patient is there or not.

The Greek poet Yannis Ritsos said when a word is true "a meeting takes place." I hope that the reader finds that in reading these poems a meeting takes place.

Review Quotes

In Henry Seiden's Spaldeen, with its deliciously homely title, humor (witty and sometimes even groan-worthy), heartache, exhilaration, and generous insights take their turns and have their way with this reader. These are large-hearted poems, loving their jokes, their remembered games, their Jewish family characters. Contemplative, insightful, and lyrical, they deliver what Seiden calls "the ache of absence." Here is a poet, not only a master of his craft, but of expansive expressive kindness, a joy to read.