Jackstraws: Poems - Hardcover

Simic, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151004226 ISBN 13: 9780151004225

Publisher: Harcourt, 1999

Synopsis

A new collection of sixty-two poems from one of the most influential and respected of contemporary poets continues his vaunted ability to create startling and effective images and retain his powerfully original voice. By the author of Walking the Black Cat. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

CHARLES SIMIC was born in Belgrade and emigrated to the United States in 1954. He is the author of many books of poetry and prose. Among other honors, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 and served as the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2007–2008.

Reviews

By now, Simic's matter-of-fact tossings off of the gothic, the banal and the absurd are so familiar that it's hard to know when he's putting us on. In this 13th collection, less allusive and lighter in tone than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Walking the Black Cat, "store windows with out-of-business signs" replace "The famous no-shows,/ Truth, Justice, and so forthA" as the poet leads us through blackly comic scenes from post-industrial America's weedy sidewalks and abandoned lots. The "big topics" often get upstaged by images of small annoyancesAflies, spiders and insects win a surprising amount of attention by climbing religious statues, crawling under the napkins of drag queens eating pot roast and provoking mock admiration: "Teeny dadaists on the march,/ You're sly and most witty/ As you disrupt my rare moments/ Of calm." But most of Simic's short, anecdotal lyrics coax depth by skewing ordinary activities, as when depicting lovers "running drenched/ Past the state prison with its armed guards/ Silhouetted in their towers against the sky," or an "evening sunlight" that would corner the speaker, "to tell me so much,/ To tell me absolutely nothing." The long sequences that end the collectionA"The Toy, "Talking to the Ceiling" and "Mystic Life"Aare among his best: promisingly experimental in structure, crammed with bits of conversation, off-center quips, invocations and definitions ("Memory, all-night's bedside tatto artist") that rise above the quotidian world they alternately parody and celebrate. Simic's sly and precocious speakers are at their best when showing us "how quiet the world gets,/ When you roll your eyes back and look."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Belgrade-born Pulitzerwinning Simic is known for his absurdist take on America's weirder tableaux (hes a sweet David Lynch), and his 13th collection is no exception. Take, for instance, El libro de la sexualidad : ``The pages of all the books are blank. / The late-night readers at the town library / Make no complaints about that.'' Simic still has his knack for scene-setting, but one too many poems of whimsical noticings begin to grate. ``Live at Club Revolution'' is strained in its cuteness: ``Are those Corinna Brown's red panties / We see flying through the dark winter trees, / Or merely a lone crow taking home / His portion of the day's roadkill?'' It's hard not to admire Simic's puckish use of riffraff to support larger metaphors. But what is the ultimate significance of his numerous oddballs, the transvestites, and the women with ``flamethrower hair''? Despite the volume's kooky overload, some of Simic's pictures of casually ridiculous America still resound here: ``Hanging Christmas decorations on a string. / ``She's an idealist in an undertaker's shop,'' / You whispered as we read the stained menu / Waiting her to turn and acknowledge us.'' Poetry more akin to a compilation of wacky news stories. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

With James Tate, Mark Strand, and others, Simic led American poetry's turn toward surrealism in the late 1960s, establishing an eerily disjunctive but imagistically arresting style. Today the Yugoslavia-born poet and 1989 Pulitzer Prize winner continues resolutely along the same antilogical, irreverent path, but that path is now deeply worn, and surprise is less easily evoked. While Simic sets up unpredictable scenes that blend the comic with the ominous ("A pastry chef carrying a lit birthday cake/ Found himself in the blinding snowstorm"), he also falls prey to an awkwardness of phrasing that can read like an unsteady translation ("The smoke that was like the skirts/ Slit on the side to give the legs freedom/ To move while dancing the tango/ Past ballroom mirrors on page 1944"). Some endings seem tacked on or settled for, as if the poet had lost interest in the dream. Like any dream journal, Jackstraws is a mixture of hits and misses, not without invention but unlikely to add substantially to Simic's established reputation.AFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151004226
• ISBN 13: 9780151004225
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 85