Product Description

When this selection of Charles Simic's work first appeared, it was hailed as "easily the best volume of poetry published in 1985....[Simic] is one of the wisest poets of his generation, and one of the best." (The Georgia Review) For this new edition of his selected poems, Simic has added twenty-eight poems and extensively revised others, making this the most complete collection available of his early work. In the spare, haunting vision of these poems, the familiar takes on a disturbing, often sinister, presence. A fork "resembles a bird's foot / Worn around the cannibal's neck" and a bird's chirp is "Like a match flickering / In a new grave." Life's horrors--violence, hunger, poverty, illness--lurk unnervingly in the background. And yet, despite the horror, a sense of wonder pervades these poems, transforming the ordinary world into a mysterious place of unknowable forces. Classic displays of the economy and grace of Simic's work, these poems occupy an established place in American poetry.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1449203 in Books
• Published on: 1999-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 255 pages

From Kirkus Reviews
If its permitted to speak of such a thing as a national character under our current tyranny of globalism, then theres a definite Eastern European, even Slavic, flavor to the entries in this collection. Born in Belgrade on the eve of WWII, Simic was heir to the twilit sensibilities of Mitteleuropa, which rendered everyday objects and situations with surrealist strokes, mystical implications, and, not least, sinister overtones. Its not imprecise to refer to this demeanor as Kafkaesquein effect, if not in intent: Nearly all of Simics verses contain one or more of these disturbing elements. But unlike the Prague novelist and a postwar generation of social-realist poets, Simics journey did not dead-end in adolescent self-absorption and life-denying seriousness. Simic made it to the US, arriving, ironically, as a teenager, quick to pick up on the American penchant for finding and expressing the humor in precisely those preposterous, though dangerous, situations. Who is Charlie Chaplin, after all, if not K. with a sense of humor? An example among these early poems is Autumn Air, in which a man instructs his family how to assuage hunger by swallowing a good deal of air: During his demonstration, the man floats up and drifts off to sea, where hes threatened by new perils. The language here is spare, even simple, but the images are complex, challenging in the way surrealist art defies ordinary perceptions, juxtaposing the whimsical and the frightening. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
His skill and sure instinct make this book one of the important poetic achievements of our time. -- The New York Times Book Review, Adam Kirsch

About the Author
Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938. He was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1983 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. He teaches at the University of New Hampshire.

Customer Reviews

An essential volume of poems
Anyone who is interested in the breadth, playfulness and imagistic intensity of contemporary American poetry needs to buy this book. Simic's early poems--surreal and yet rooted many times in the commonalities of life--are sparse yet full of surprises. These poems, when I was an undergrad, changed the way I THOUGHT about poetry, what it could accomplish. Nearly devoid of literary pretentions, Simic's poetry is nonetheless artful, using slang, riddles and the like to construct his worlds-within-poems. Simic later wrote a book called Dimestore Alchemy on the work of Joseph Cornell and I couldn't think of a better description than 'dimestore alchemy' for his own poetry. Few books are essentials, but this is one of them, a certified desert-island book for poets and lovers of poetry.

Great poems, collection a bit lacking
This book is all right if you're just discovering Simic, but if you're adding it to a collection it's not an essential buy. Despite the dust jacket's promise it doesn't deliver in the way of new or revised material, and the choice of poems mirrors too much the older (and cheaper) compilation, Selected Poems. Most of Simic's books are available and very affordable in paperback, and once you get to know him, you'll want them all. The "greatest hits" package here is optional.