A Wedding in Hell: Poems - Hardcover

Simic, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151001235 ISBN 13: 9780151001231

Publisher: Harcourt, 1994

Synopsis

In his new volume of poems, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic juxtaposes the joys of the everyday - the unabashed pleasure of sex, the beauty of nature - against a haunting landscape of shattered windows, soldiers on the march, stray dogs, homeless men, and a God still making up His mind.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Simic is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

Reviews

The world according to Simic (Hotel Insomnia) has never been an especially nice place, and his new collection of poems registers no signs of improvement. Urban decay, war and the depravities of false priests and corrupt rulers provide the occasions for much of this work, where private desperation is seen to be our lot and any respite momentary, at best. The knack of Simic's poetry is to have found a voice to reflect on such matters without sounding solemn or maudlin-a plainspoken, slightly wary voice that wins our confidence by its apparent modesty and our gratitude by its power to surprise, accommodating cynicism and injured outcries. Still, nothing that Simic says, however humanly concerned, is without the salt of irony, sometimes heavily applied. Even his approach to poetic form has become ironic: surrealist images, used to startling effect in his early books, are now more commonly deployed as near cliches, persuading us there's nothing new under the sun; individual poems have a self-consciously throwaway quality, as if to advise us that they are no better than anything else. And yet Simic's poetry comforts and (ironically) charms us, too, even as it insists that it is only "like the wind/ Between the cold winter stars./ A creaky door/ Way out in the darkness./ Some kind of small bird/ Trapped by a cat/ And calling on heaven to witness."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Simic is a poet of quiet angst and profound skepticism. His poems reflect this in their brevity and spareness. In his newest collection, he seems to be working with a set number of images and words he uses like puzzle pieces to create a series of desolate and enigmatic poems. Some of these recurring images include a stopped clock, a dark window, a cockroach, a TV with the sound off tuned to a sex scene, and Christ in pain. Simic's blasted world lies stunned beneath the "mad serenity" of the sky. People are destitute or, at best, uneasy, occupied with empty rituals of watchfulness undermined by apathy. These are tense and biting poems of resignation, fragmented dreams, and melancholia. Some are prayers to a muddled God half afraid of his own creations, while others reveal a bleak humor in the perversity of things, in death shadowing every glimmer of life. These poems are hard-edged and unsettling, but as you acclimate yourself to Simic's grim outlook, images of startling intensity and intelligence leap from the page like heat lightning on an oppressive night, and you nod in respectful recognition. Donna Seaman

What can possibly be said when the burden of experience threatens to shut one down? This challenge, as it occurs in these poems, results in airless, end-stopped lines that act as exercises to memory, much like the boxes of Joseph Cornell (to whom Simic has written the homage Dime-Store Alchemy, Ecco Pr., 1992). Whatever is necessary to the image is left in; whatever serves its aggrandizement is left out. The remains accumulate and strike out in odd directions. "Just thinking about it, I forgot to wind the clock./We woke up in the dark./How quiet the city is, I said./Like the clocks of the dead, my wife replied./Grandmother on the wall,/I heard the snows of your childhood/Begin to fall." The pressure evident here is often alleviated by humor and consummate irony. In this 12th collection, the poet again manages to live up to his well-deserved reputation. Recommended for all poetry collections.
Steven R. Ellis, Brooklyn P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151001235
• ISBN 13: 9780151001231
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 79