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As a child, Charles Simic (b. 1938) immigrated to the United States with his family from war-torn Europe and did not speak English until the age of 15. He published his first volume of poetry in 1959 when he was 21. Since that time, Simic has won a large reputation and an enviable readership for an American poet. Among other honors, he has won the Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur "Genius" Award, and the Wallace Stevens Award. From 2007-2008, Simic served as the poet laureate of the United States.
In his new book, "New and Selected Poems: 1962 -- 2012" Simic gathers together nearly 400 poems beginning with a selection of early works and concluding with 17 new poems. The selections cover 13 previously published volumes. With its size and comprehensiveness, the volume offers and outstanding overview of Simic's poetry. Readers new to Simic who persevere will get an understanding of his work. Readers familiar with the poet will find their favorites together with much that is new.
Even though his work cannot readily be categorized, critical reviews over the years and the perceptive reader reviews here on Amazon offer an unusually consistent portrayal of what Simic is about. The Amazon reviews and Poetry Magazine's discussion of Simic (the source of the quotes which follow) helped confirm my own reading of this volume. Some of Simic's poems offer "a surreal metaphysical bent" while others offer "grimly realistic portraits of violence and despair". They frequently "challenge the dividing line between the ordinary and extraordinary". As one critic has aptly written: "Simic's work has frequently been described by a handful of adjectives: words like 'inimitable', 'surreal', and 'nightmarish' have followed him around in countless reviews and articles". Another critic has said that 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 Mr. Simic's verse remains recognizably American -- not just in its grainy hard-boiled textures, straight out of 1940's film noir, but in the very confidence of its eclecticism."
Although there are a number of extended works in this volume, most of the poems are short. They tend to be written in short, unrhymed lines and in stanzas. The poems move frequently in a quiet, unassuming tone with an often unexpected and jarring figure at the end. A number of poems have an overtly historical or political theme, with the early poems especially emphasizing Simic's traumatic early life in Europe while the latter poems tend to transfer the situation to current world affairs and to the United States. Many of the poems have country settings as Simic has lived in rural New England for many years. For me, the more characteristic poems showed scenes of lonely and harsh city life with settings in both crowded and deserted streets ("Tattooed City"), seedy hotels, ("Hotel Insomnia", "Night Clerk in a Roach Hotel") or small, frequently shabby establishments ("Used Clothing Store", "In the Junk Store", "Used Book Store"). The poems have a feeling of wandering, grit, and a search for meaning that is indeed shared with some of the noir and other fiction I have been reading of late.
The poems I tended to notice were those of an expressly theological or philosophical turn. Simic is a nonbeliever whose poems are informed by a search for God and by a transcendental turn. Poems such as "The Absentee Landlord" "Master of Disguises" and "Puppet Maker" are meditations upon an absent God. As do some other people of nontraditional theologies, Simic shows a strong interest in mysticism, reflected most immediately in poems with titles such as "The Writings of the Mystics", "De Occulta Philosophia", "Mystic Life", "Mystics", "St. Thomas Aquinas", "The Lives of the Alchemists", "The Tragic Sense of Life" and others.
Philosophers, philosophical issues, and philosophical discussions with others in cafes and on street corners abound in these pages. The most immediately striking of these poems to me was "The Friends of Heraclitus". The poem begins with an announcement that "Your friend has died, with whom/ You roamed the streets,/At all hours, talking philosophy." The surviving companion must go it alone, arguing with himself about the "subject of appearances:/The world we see in our heads/And the world we see daily,/ So difficult to tell apart/ When grief and sorrow bow us over." As the lonely individual wanders the streets, the poet asks: "What was that fragment of Heraclitus/You were trying to remember/As you stepped on the butcher's cat?" Then the poem pivots to conclude with the philosopher's "sudden terror and exhilaration/At the sight of a girl/Dressed up for a night of dancing/Speeding by on roller skates."
Although some readers may disagree, I don't see a major shifts in themes or style from the earliest to the most recent of these poems. The works display a consistency of approach over time. The poems still manage to remain, on the whole, cohesive, fresh, and unusual in their scope.
I enjoyed the opportunity to take a broad look at Simic's poetry over his life through this volume. The book can be read from cover to cover, as in my reading, or, as with any work consisting of a large number of poems, browsed selectively and repeatedly over time.
