Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems - Hardcover

Simic, Charles

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807614564 ISBN 13: 9780807614563

Publisher: George Braziller, 1999

Synopsis

Charles Simic is widely recognized as one of America's leading poets. Selected Poems, 1963- 1983 was lauded as "easily the best volume of poetry published in 1985." In this newly expanded edition entitled Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems, to which the author has added twenty-seven poems and extensively revised others, we are treated to Simic's terse style, incisive imagery, and often disturbing rendering of everyday experiences--all coupled with a delightful sense of humor and more than a touch of mysticism.

About this title

About the Author

Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938. He was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1983 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. He teaches at the University of New Hampshire.

Reviews

If its permitted to speak of such a thing as a national character under our current tyranny of globalism, then theres a definite Eastern European, even Slavic, flavor to the entries in this collection. Born in Belgrade on the eve of WWII, Simic was heir to the twilit sensibilities of Mitteleuropa, which rendered everyday objects and situations with surrealist strokes, mystical implications, and, not least, sinister overtones. Its not imprecise to refer to this demeanor as Kafkaesquein effect, if not in intent: Nearly all of Simics verses contain one or more of these disturbing elements. But unlike the Prague novelist and a postwar generation of social-realist poets, Simics journey did not dead-end in adolescent self-absorption and life-denying seriousness. Simic made it to the US, arriving, ironically, as a teenager, quick to pick up on the American penchant for finding and expressing the humor in precisely those preposterous, though dangerous, situations. Who is Charlie Chaplin, after all, if not K. with a sense of humor? An example among these early poems is Autumn Air, in which a man instructs his family how to assuage hunger by swallowing a good deal of air: During his demonstration, the man floats up and drifts off to sea, where hes threatened by new perils. The language here is spare, even simple, but the images are complex, challenging in the way surrealist art defies ordinary perceptions, juxtaposing the whimsical and the frightening. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: George Braziller
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807614564
• ISBN 13: 9780807614563
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264