Customer Reviews

The Book of Gods and Devils

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The Book of Gods and Devils is one of my favorite books of poetry... It's absolutely fabulous! It has a touch of melancholy, humor, to be sure, and wonderful imagery... we dance with religious icons shamelessly! Wonderful!

Charles Simic, The Book of Gods and Devils (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990)

Another fine piece of work from Mr. Simic, but this one seems the smallest of cuts below his best efforts (The World Doesn't End, Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, et al). Hard to explain why this is; I want to say it's more in the confessional mode than most of his work, but if this is the case, it's by an infinitesimal amount and would not otherwise be worth noting. Problem is, I can't put my finger on anything else.

Still, when Simic is in the zone, his writing eclipses most others who have worked in the medium in the twentieth century. Take, for example, pieces from the brilliant "The Great War":

"...You never saw anything as beautiful
As those clay regiments; I used to lie on the floor
For hours, staring them in the eyes.
I remember them staring back at me in wonder.

How strange they must have felt
Standing stiffly at attention
Before a large, incomprehending creature
With a moustache made of milk...."

Definitely another worthwhile contribution to the canon, but there are better places for the neophyte to begin. ****