Amazon.com Review
Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, this collection represents what many experts feel is Charles Simic's finest work. This expanded edition contains 33 revisions of many of the original collection's poems. Simic's imagery and meaning rely heavily and beautifully on line breaks and their rhythm. His phrases create their own separate thoughts between line breaks, easing the music of the poem into a slower, contemplative pace despite the topic: "Because I am the bullet / that has gone through everyone already / I thought of you long before you thought of me" (from "What the White Had to Say"). Simic lends clarity to that which is otherwise complex.
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From Library Journal
Simic, an important contemporary American poet, displays his originality and wit throughout this volume, even in the titles (``Concerning My Neighbors the Hittites'' and ``Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators''). His playful but disturbing parables present the familiar in an unusual perspective. Office workers become ``anonymous multitudes/ Bent over the day's/ Wondrously useless labor.'' Knives in a butcher shop ``glitter like altars/ In a dark church.'' Sometimes Simic's disconcerting juxtapositions point to nihilism, sometimes to ``a presentiment/ Of a higher existence/ In things familiar and drab.'' However, in exploring metaphysical conundrums Simic always takes joyful delight in the strange: ``Oh the sweet speech of trees/ In the evening breeze/ Of some other summer.'' Joseph A. Lipari, St. John's Univ. Lib., Staten Island Campus,
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.
