"The range of Charles Simic's imagination is evident in his stunning and unusual imagery. He handles language with the skill of a master craftsman, yet his poems are easily accessible, often meditative and surprising. He has given us a rich body of highly organized poetry with shades of darkness and flashes of ironic humor." --James H. Billington, Librarian of Congress
"[Simic] draws on the dark satire of Central Europe, the sensual rhapsody of Latin America, and the fraught juxtapositions of French Surrealism, to create a style like nothing else in American literature. Yet [his] verse remains recognizably American--not just in its grainy, hard-boiled textures, straight out of 1940s film noir, but in the very confidence of its eclecticism." --Adam Kirsch, New York Sun
Here are sixty of Charles Simic's best-loved poems, collected to celebrate his appointment as the fifteenth poet laureate of the United States.
Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his brilliant poetic imagery; his social, political, and moral alertness; his uncanny ability to make the ordinary extraordinary; and not least, a sardonic humor all his own. Gathering much of his material from the seemingly mundane minutia of American culture, Simic matches meditations on spiritual concerns and the weight of history with a nimble wit, shifting effortlessly to moments of clear vision and intense poetic revelation.
"Few poets have been as influential--or as inimitable--as Charles Simic." --The New York Times Book Review
"It takes just one glimpse of Charles Simic's work to establish that he is a master, ruler of his own eccentric kingdom of jittery syntax and signature insight." --Los Angeles Times
Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, and immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1954, at the age of sixteen. Recently retired from the University of New Hampshire, where he taught American literature and creative writing, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 and held a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant from 1984 to 1989. He is the winner of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.