The World Doesn't End - Softcover

Simic, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156983508 ISBN 13: 9780156983501

Publisher: Ecco, 1989

Synopsis

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book Review

You never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.

He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity.

Charles Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets us see through them. 

About this title

About the Author

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

Reviews

A master of the absurd and the unexpected, Simic ( Unending Blues ) presents a collection of prose poems that will not fail to amuse and delight. Writing in a series of "short-take" lyrical sentences, he builds observation upon observation to create paragraphs that startle through the juxtaposition of images and gratify through the freshness of his vision. Never one to shy away from the bizarre or the prosaic, Simic carries his poems to their logical--or illogical--extremes: "The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm . . . he takes a seat at one of the tables at the tavern and orders two beers, one for him and one for his head." The poems move seamlessly between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and, although one often puzzles to draw conclusions from his fantastic verse, readers will not lose interest or the sense of pleasant surprise at the end of each work. The poem quoted in part above, for example, concludes powerfully: "It's so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0156983508
• ISBN 13: 9780156983501
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96