Customer Reviews

Selected Poems, 1963-1983

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Simic's best work somehow manages to be both surrealistic and lucid. Expressionistic black & white takes on the Old Country (E. Europe in the years following the second world war) and the New World (the bustling, booming Chicago Simic emigrated to as a teenager). The poems on silverware alone worth the price of the book. Strange and wonderful.

Read any book by the touching, spare, philosophical, and simple poet Charles Simic. Read this if you hate poetry. read this if you love poetry. Today most poets are mired in the concrete. Masters of decorative language, they don't seem to have a point. Simic is a must read for poets, and all writers. He mentions his clothes often. This for me represents his respect for the common, the low. yet he tastefully reaches for the ether at the same time. He is one of the best of our century! However his intellect is huge but doesn't bother us with pretentious references to other poems or pseudo-intellectual babbling. He is surreal in a sense of mood. He says a lot with a few words.