Selected Poems 1963 - 2003 - Softcover

Simic, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571222722 ISBN 13: 9780571222728

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2004

Synopsis

Serbian by birth, brought up under Nazi occupation and transplanted to America in his teens, Charles Simic has had the opportunity to distill a highly particular vision of the world, in which comic gaiety goes hand in hand with the recognition of our darker spiritual and philosophical problems. Blending the real and the surreal, the urbane and the uncanny, Simic's poems construct a neighbourhood of experience that is estranged yet recognisably at home with its surroundings. He notes what the eye sees and what the subsconscious has to say on the matter, in a poetry which is a triumph of the plain style.

This selection, made by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author himself from forty years of writing, is an outstanding overview of one of the wisest American poets.

'Simic's writing comes dancing out on the balls of its feet, colloquially fit as a fiddle, a sparring partner for the world.' Seamus Heaney

About this title

Review

"Few contemporary poets have been as influential - or as inimitable - as Charles Simic.' New York Times Book Review; 'Surrealist, and therefore comic, but with a specific gravity in his imagining that manages to avoid the surrealist penalty of weightlessness.' Seamus Heaney; 'There is no American now writing whom I would rather read.' Michael Hofmann"

About the Author

Charles Simic was born in 1938 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia and emigrated to the United States in 1954. His first collection was published in 1971, and in the three decades that have followed he has received numerous awards and honours for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN International Award for translation. Since 1973, Simic has taught English at the University of New Hampshire.

Edition details

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0571222722
• ISBN 13: 9780571222728
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176