The Zingers of Adam Sedia and the Voice of Ancient Egypt
A review by Theresa Werba
Metadata:
Title: “Elysium"
Author: Adam Sedia
Independently Published
ISBN: 979-8316796984
Released April 2025
Available at: https://a.co/d/0g1yWnAT
$12.00 paperback
76 pages
And other titles:
“The Spring’s Autumn" (May 2013), https://a.co/d/0bT8dkJj, available in paperback $12.00, and Kindle $2.99 ); and
"The Opening of the Mouth" (April, 2026), available in paperback https://a.co/d/008iQwpO, paperback
I have had the pleasure of reading the poetry of Adam Sedia for many years, and additionally had the pleasure of a face-to-face meeting at the SCP Symposium in New York in 2019. I have always been impressed with him as an uncommonly good poet and I am delighted to finally be able to share my thoughts and impressions of his work.
Sedia was the 2019 First Place winner of the Society of Classical Poets annual competition, having placed 2nd in 2018. He has been long recognized and appreciated within the formal poetry community, and deserves to be more widely known. I do enjoy bringing attention to poets who might be more modest than their talent demands, and Adam Sedia is a poet I have been wanting to review for some time.
Sedia has the unique gift of employing what I call “Zingers”— a combination or interplay or juxtaposition of words which are so unique and unusual (and unusually good) that they just pop out at you. Not only is Sedia a careful, measured poet with extremely fine and precise diction, but he manages to combine commonly-used words in uncommon ways in addition to the “Zingers”, which elevate his writing to a whole new level. Although his Zingers are appreciated more powerfully and potently in their poetic context, you can take them out and enjoy them as a microcosm of great creativity and innovation on their own merit.
In his first publication, the 2013 The Spring’s Autum, Sedia begins with “Convocation”, a prayer for poetic inspiration:
“Let me bring order from chaos;
Let me shine light through the haze;
Let me build towering castles
To capture the wandering gaze.
Just as the smith hammers metal,
Just as the sculptor hews stone,
Just as the carpenter dresses,
I fashion a form of my own.
Give me my tools, my material:
Sound upon trembling lips,
Phantoms that dart though the mind-paths,
And serpentine contours of script.
Give them to me! I shall mold them
Not into mad disarray,
But into a dulcet gold clarion
That beautifies what I must say.
Thou, who first fashioned the cosmos
From the primeval abyss,
Gave it both order and meaning,
May I do likewise with this!”
This poem certainly would resonate with anyone writing formal poetry, for Sedia gives homage to “order and meaning” while eschewing “mad disarray”, an indictment of much of the vomitus and detritus that passes for contemporary “free verse” poetry today (I say this as a poet who write both formal poetry and free verse). The Zingers in this poem that resonate with me are: “Phantoms that dart though the mind-paths;” “serpentine contours of script”,and my musical favorite ,“a dulcet gold clarion.”
In “Death of Leviathan” we have the Zinger: “As its effusions ooze and churn”, while in “Two Volcanos” we have “a raging pyroclastic hell;” in “Nameless Fossil” we have “Paleozoic sludge” and in “February Snowfall” we have “opalescent fog”. Other Zingers I found noteworthy include “roseate orbs” in “Peonies;” “the years of torrid, fecund apogee” in “To September,” and “Stars now dot the blue Of the crepuscule” (which means the time between the beginning of the setting sun until sunset) in “Vespers; in “Two Cleansings” we have the highly memorable “So, too, the infant skin grew maculate.”
In “To the Stars” Sedia speaks to the stars like a kind of prayer, using the Zinger “Faint, feeble scintillations” which is starlight within an equally luminous poem:
“Night’s mantle drapes its sable folds, dyed deep
With trillion-mile-wide emptiness, bleak cloak
Encompassing all ages’ endless sweep.
You, myriads, hurl blinding, flame-born rays –
Faint, feeble scintillations once they poke
Through voids to meet a yearning, upward gaze.
Those crystal eyes stare out, indifferent
To this far-distant speck, just one perhaps
Of many whirring through the firmament.
You wind precession’s stately minuet
Of eons; your nocturnal circling wraps
Around the pole-star, confidently set.
But we spin giddily; you stand unswayed
By turbulent, primeval wind and flame
Of chaos where no end may be surveyed.
What comfort can you give? I long to view
Divine perfection far from earthly shame
And death, as bygone ages saw in you.
Immutable, irrefutable laws
That govern how your every atom moves,
Perhaps, were not decreed without a cause.
Your chaos yet is ordered: let that be
The only evidence I need that proves
My longing more than dreamy fantasy.”
Although I find Sedia’s poetry outstanding across the board, when he shares more of his personal, internal feelings, it is rendered very powerful by its restraint. No sloppy mush or saccharine, trite or maudlin sentimentality here! In the villanelle “Remembrance” we have a fine Zinger in “screaming gales of passion”:
“Remembrance haunts, persisting like a ghost;
It drains the soul and gnaws upon the heart,
For always we destroy what we love most.
We countenance too late, too late we boast
The lover in whose love we wished no part –
Remembrance haunts, persisting like a ghost.
The idol we adored, abject, engrossed,
Our screaming gales of passion tore apart,
For always we destroy what we love most.
The land we fled for a less hostile coast,
We pine for now, long since we dared depart –
Remembrance haunts, persisting like a ghost.
The gentle lamb we slaughter, carve and roast
Was yesterday our dearest counterpart,
For always we destroy what we love most.
And never can we resurrect the host
Of victims in our trail, despite our art;
Remembrance haunts, persisting like a ghost;
For always we destroy what we love most.”
Sedia’s 2025 Elysium is a collection of nature-oriented observations of sunsets, herons, sunrise, trees, plants, and even mushrooms. It is a careful observation of nature and a work which verily loves and honors it. It is especially rich in Zingers: “soft denouement of day” in the opening “Elysium;” “Shroud of all the simulacra/Masking the world to come” in “Incense;” “thorn-trees crisscrossed shadows” as well as “Clash of cloying sights and sounds” in “In Urbe Hortus;” “curved sextuple petals” in “The gift of Lillies;” “Smashed, stinking remnants” along with “Consumed consuming unto pang-wracked death” in “Mushrooms;” “demons from the cloaca of hell;” “curvaceous ochre gyre”in “To a Conch Shell’” and probably my favorite, “Botryoidal puffs shining white” in “Love and Vipers.”
My favorite poem in the collection is “The Poet’s Spirit”, a sonnet in memory to a distant ancestral relative, the Italian poet Alceste De Lollis:
“Across two centuries’ and an ocean’s span,
You born to Dante’s, I to Shakespeare’s tongue,
Our blood unites us, scions of one clan,
Whose forebears Horace entertained in song.
But more than blood spans distance, tongue, and time:
The flame, the spirit that all poets share—
The ear attuned to music, rhythm, and rhyme;
The eye aware of beauty everywhere.
And in it Truth, eternal, changeless, clear;
The mind that can extract the hidden good.
These unseen bonds of spirit draw us near—
More than mere blood and surname ever could.
Through blood will perish, spirit never dies,
And thus is where our truest kinship lies.”
If I myself were related to any great poet of the past, I could not imagine having captured my reverence, sentiment, and sense of connection to a poet across history and time better than this sonnet of Adam Sedia.
It was a very interesting and refreshing experience to read Adam Sedia’s latest collection The Opening of the Mouth. Long admiring his talents, this book surprises me and delights me in still being Adam Sedia but his presenting himself through an innovative approach through a novel idiom. In this collection of love poems and hymns, he has reached back to Ancient Egypt for inspiration. “It started as an experiment,” Sedia explains, “to see how well a contemporary American mind could express itself in a voice so far removed its experience.” That we still write sonnets from Italy, villanelles from France, pantoums from Malaysia and haikus from Japan is testament to the versatility and resilience of poetic forms engendered in other countries and cultures. It was so satisfying to see what Sedia can do with such a challenge before him— he has come through with flying colors. He captures what he calls the “strange beauty” of the idiom, particularly in how “simple” and yet how “powerful” it is.
In referencing the 1920s work Ancient Egyptian Poetry and Prose by Adolf Erman, Sedia explains that Egyptian poetry makes particular used of “parallelism of its members.” This involves stating an idea and then restating it a different way in the following line. This technique has “parallels” in ancient Babylonian and even Hebrew poetry—the psalms are replete with parallelisms. The poetry is structured by 2-4 short lines of unrhymed verse in a stanza, with 2-4 accented syllables per line. Stanzas may repeated lines from previous stanzas. The lines will have the characteristic parallelisms, along with the use of alliteration. Sedia also made the choice to employ English archaisms such as “thy”, “thee”, and “thine”; he states that this “conveyed a wonderfully otherworldly sense of the antiquity of the style and the elevated language used for poetry in the ancient world.” Though Ancient Egyptian poetry employs the use of “paronomasia”, the use of puns on the names of objects, Sedia did not choose to use paronomasia in this collection, citing translation difficulties. He did find English well-suited to the alliterative nature of Egyptian poetry, noting that this has been a feature of English poetry since the dawn of our language. He also establishes at the outset that although he is Catholic, he seeks to write in a “thoroughly pagan voice” while avoiding “sacrificing either personal devotion or sincerity.” What he claims to sacrifice, however, is “some faithfulness” to the original style. His goal is to “seek a common humanity” in his use of this idiom, feeling that “the poems lose nothing” by his choice to omit overt references to pagan gods. In its stead, he does reference Duat (the Egyptian netherworld) and the gods, but does not offer praise to them, noting that many Egyptian texts are not “overtly religious” to begin with. He then provides us with a collection love poems, along with a shorter collection of “hymns” which “mourn for the dead in a borrowed voice from that long-vanished world.” I have a lot of respect for any writer or poet who nonetheless is open to expression and revelation in forms or styles outside his or her tradition or comfort zone.
I found Sedia’s love poems in this collection to be among the most exquisite I have ever read. There is definitely an echo of the past which permeates the reading experience— I felt like I had a window into a world very different from my own, and yet being surprised at how similar the emotions and observations expressed were to my own today. I truly felt transported to sand and sun, the Nile and the Sphinx and the pyramids, while at the same time feeling a surprising resonance of truth within the memories of my own experiences.
Take, for example, love poem “II”:
“Thy flesh is of glimmering gold,
Gleaming like the morning sun.
And thy hair is of lapis lazuli,
Lustrous, of heavenly hue.
Thy lips are of polished carnelian;
They are red like hills of jasper.
Thy teeth are of whitest ivory,
Of silver glowing like the moon.
How precious thou art, O exalted one!
How precious, delight of mine eye!
Established forever among the holy ones,
Enduring like the gods of Duat.”
We immediately see the alliterations in “glimmering gold,/Gleaming”, “lapis lazuli,/Lustrous,” “heavenly hue”, along with the parallelisms of “glimmering/gleaming” (words doing double duty!), “whitest ivory”/”silver glowing like the moon”, “Established/Enduring.” While not “Zingers” in the sense which he employs them in his more traditional poetry, he nevertheless provokes us withimagery— the use of earthly elements—gold, lapis lazuli, carnelian, ivory, silver, to give us an unusual mental image of his colorfully rendered “exalted one”. I also find the reference to Durat to provide that echo from the past which for me, brings ancient Egypt right to the forefront of my mind.
I also found love song “IV” to be subtly erotic and very beautiful:
“Thy breath is like the lotus,
Like the lotus, sweet of scent,
Perfuming the twilight air.
Wafting its fragrance towards the stars.
When I smell my evening lotus,
When I inhale her sumptuous breath,
I reel, drunk with wine,
I stagger like a raving madman.
And how I long for more!
How I am rapt with that scent,
With the fragrances that rises through evening,
The sweetness that softens the dusk.”
The repetition of “like the lotus” is both alliterative and creates the parallelism of the first two lines. Other parallelisms of “perfuming/wafting”, “smell/inhale,” “reel/stagger”, “long for/rapt”, “fragrances/sweetness” combine with imagery of his love as a lotus, in an erotic, subtle tenderness.
What also strikes me as particularly arresting in this form is the lack of rhyme. We expect this absence from free verse, or blank verse—but here is unrhymed poetry, in a very ancient style, held together through other structural elements. For me, it gives the poems an eerie quality, a sense of something old and far away, like the sound in the echo of a memory. Somehow the absence of rhyme only causes the ear to draw even more fully to the alliteration and parallelisms inherent in this form. Moreover, what we are given in these poems in the Ancient Egyptian style are not the “Zingers” of Sedia’s traditional poetry, but something like the difference between an oil painting and a watercolor: the oils are “Zingers”; the Egyptian love poems are rendered in a quieter, almost softer register, much as watercolors are subtle, reflective, and often very tenderly rendered.
I found that it is best to savor each of Adam’s poems in “The Opening of the Mouth” as one would a dessert of rich fudge or mousse, paired with a fine espresso, best enjoyed slowly, and mindfully, letting the unfolding of the reading experience also be an end unto itself. It is in the measured and almost otherworldly approach to this collection that one begins to see in the mind’s eye the Nile, Sphynx, and pyramids, and the universality of human experience across the aeons.
I have given the reader a glimpse of the treasures in the poetry of Adam Sedia, from his first collection to his latest collection. In between, there is Heights and Depths (2024), Visions Beyond (2018) and Inquietude (2016). Many volumes to choose from, and I encourage any lover of excellent poetry to download or get a hard copy of at least one of his works. I have endeavored to give an overview of Sedia’s range and capabilities. He brings novel innovation combined with careful diction and a measured form of passion that it is truly the mark of a virtuoso poet. Sedia deserves to be more widely known and fully appreciated for the truly great American poet that he is. I hope you will join me and others who have been treated to his Zingers, and his mysteries inspired by the ancient Land of the Nile!!!
More About Adam Sedia is the author of six books of poetry: The Spring’s Autumn (2013), Inquietude (2016), Visions Beyond(2108), Heights and Depths (2024), Elysium (2025) and his newly-released collection The Opening of the Mouth(2026). His poems, essays, and fiction have appeared in various literary journals, including the SCP Journal. He was the First Place Winner of the 2019 Society of Classical Poets International Poetry Competition. He is also a composer, and his musical works may be heard on his YouTube channel. He lives in his native Northwest Indiana and practices law as a civil and appellate litigator.
More About Reviewer Theresa Werba
Werba is the author of eight books, including What Was and Is: Formal Poetry and Free Verse and Sonnets, collection in Shakespearean, Petrarchan, and Spenserian forms, which will be published in a revised and expanded edition of 100 sonnets in 2027. Her work has appeared numerous journals and online publications, including the SCP Journal. She has appeared as a guest on Classical Poets Live with Andrew Benson Brown where she discusses rhythm and harmony in poetry. She is contributing writer for Classical Singer Magazine. Werba’s background as a Classical singer informs her dramatic poetry readings and she may be found on Youtube at @theresawerba and on social media@thesonnetqueen. Her website is www.theresawerba.com.
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