Unending Blues: Poems [Paperback]

Charles Simic (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 21, 1986

Whether he draws for inspiration on American blues, Serbian folktales, or Greek myths, Simic's words have a way of their own. Each of these forty-four poems is a powerful mixture of concrete images. Each records the reality and myth of the world around us-and in us. "Short, perfectly shaped, Simic's poems float past like feathers, turning one way, then another" (Village Voice).

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Simic's poetry is haunted by cars passing in a drizzle, shadowy women stirring black coffee, a "madwoman . . . marking x's/ . . . On the backs of unsuspecting/ Hand-holding, homebound couples." Mocking, fearful of desire, faintly tinged with old-fashioned romanticism, these dark meditations investigate archetypes animated by sensuality: "The gods/ Looked like hairdressers for dead/ Lovers. I made myself learn/Their names so I could rename/ All my neighbors. . . . " Sometimes the twilight states that are invoked send shivers down the spine; at other times the result has a forced solemnity. At his best Simic reaches through the "unending blues" of a consciousness in turmoil to find "Sign and enigma in the humblest of things." Frank Allen, Assoc. Dean, Continuing Education, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Simic's poetry is haunted by cars passing in a drizzle, shadowy women stirring black coffee, a "madwoman . . . marking x's/ . . . On the backs of unsuspecting/ Hand-holding, homebound couples." Mocking, fearful of desire, faintly tinged with old-fashioned romanticism, these dark meditations investigate archetypes animated by sensuality: "The gods/ Looked like hairdressers for dead/ Lovers. I made myself learn/Their names so I could rename/ All my neighbors. . . . " Sometimes the twilight states that are invoked send shivers down the spine; at other times the result has a forced solemnity. At his best Simic reaches through the "unending blues" of a consciousness in turmoil to find "Sign and enigma in the humblest of things." Frank Allen, Assoc. Dean, Continuing Education, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
(Library Journal )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1 edition (November 21, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156928310
• ISBN-13: 978-0156928311
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 4.8 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,133,951 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun., August 4, 2003

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Unending Blues: Poems (Paperback)

Charles Simic, Unending Blues (Harcourt Brace, 1986)

To call Charles Simic a poor man's Clayton Eshleman would probably not be giving Simic his full due. After all, Simic is a Pulitzer Prize winner (1990, for The World Doesn't End), a recipient of a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (Jackstraws), a finalist for the National Book Award (Walking the Black Cat), a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. I mean, the guy's good. Only a purist would find fault with Simic, right?

Probably. And faults to be found with Simic are minor at best, for the most part (the odd "what was he thinking?" line break, etc.). But sometimes, while reading Unending Blues, one of Simic's over-sixty books, it occurred to me that the fundamental premise of what Simic has been trying to do since his first poems were published over forty years ago is one that invites failure. That he succeeds with it as much as he does is astounding.

Simic is a surrealist in many ways (thus my comparing him to Eshleman, by far the foremost American surrealist of the latter half of the twentieth century), but at the same time he has a desire to write accessible, commercially viable work. This is not a bad thing in itself; the quest for commercial viability in poetry, the quest for accessibility, is one of the things that drives many of us. But to combine it with surrealism, one of whose main tropes throughout its existence has been the deliberately obscure? Flirting with disaster, one thinks. The hallmark of the search for accessibility in poetry over the past fifty years has been to provide easy answers to those whose first question upon completing a poem is "but what does it mean?" (and damn the eyes of all English teachers across the world who have led us to believe that what a poem means is the most important thing about it.) It would seem that surrealism, which forces the reader to think, would be anathema. And yet somehow Simic has been pulling it off for decades. And once again, in Unending Blues, he for the most part succeeds. He loses his way every once in a while, but far less than most poets treading such a dangerous path would; the majority of the work here resembles an odd, surrealist T. S. Eliot (in the early years, before Eliot got so wordy) more than it does Billy Collins (or Eshleman).

Unending Blues is not a landmark book. It isn't as mind-numbingly brilliant as Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, it isn't as commercial as Jackstraws, it doesn't ring with the bell of importance as does White or Walking the Black Cat. But as an intro to Simic, or as a lighter read between two more weighty works, Unending Blues can't be beat. Still in print, which is a tad surprising for a book that in the poetry world was printed in the ice age, and worth picking up. ****

5.0 out of 5 stars "Then the coldly dawning suspicion--", January 6, 2009

By 

Greg Bem - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unending Blues: Poems (Paperback)

For fans of Kenneth Rexroth, Frank O'Hara

Unending Blues (1983) is the kind of poetry collection that you can take around everywhere and read when the occasional minute frees up. I read this thing in a matter of two days (it's a very short book, being only 58 pages and forty-four poems long), but I also found myself reading poems multiple times not merely for understanding, but to ingrain Simic's wonderful, silent images into my head. That's the thing about his images--there are so many successful strays from cliche that each line or combination of lines finds difficulty in sticking upon a first reading. Like in "Painters of Angels and Seraphim," which goes far to capture a single visual essence or moment in time without dragging itself into oblivion with too many details, too little punch:

After a long lunch of roast lamb
And many heavy glasses of heavy red wine,
I fell asleep in a rowboat
That I never got around to untie
From its mooring under the willows
That went on fussing over my head
As if to make my shade even deeper.

I woke once to pull my shirt off,
And once when I heard my name
Called by a woman, distant and worried,
Since it was past sundown,
The water reflecting the dark hills,
And the sky of that chill blue
That used to signify a state of grace.

The preponderance of imagery leads the poem into a healthy state of rhythm that almost avoids that dash and dabble of darkness that lies under the surface. And the book is abound with similar conflicts both strange and alluring. There is a sense of absence and a sense that the speaker, which in a Simic poem almost always feels biographical (much like O'Hara, whose poems of daily life concentrate the imagination on how the world is perceived in the first person rather than splicing creativity onto more displaced, fictive perspectives), only has a series of spitfire-image-presentation memories to deal with. In reading these poems, I'm reminded of films that use dream sequences with many choppy shots, that are more a compilation of isolated events that form a more unifying whole. Of course, Simic's poems are rarely fragmentary, at least in this collection, which is where I found most of my attraction--the everyday vernacular is paired with well-rounded, obligatory grammar and syntax which not only helps show that the speaker has retained some sort of sanity and stability (masculine, perhaps, sensibility?) but knows that there is an audience out there listening to him as poet not him as babbling buffoon. Like in "William and Cynthia," which transplants the biography of others onto Simic's speaker:

Says she'll take him to the Museum
Of Dead Ideas and Emotions.
Wonders that he hasn't been there yet.
Says it looks like a Federal courthouse
With its many steps and massive columns.

Apparently not many people go there
On such drizzly gray afternoons.
Says even she gets afraid
In the large empty exhibition halls
With monstrous ideas in glass cases,
Naked emotions on stone pedestals
In classically provocative poses.

Says she doesn't understand why he claims
All that reminds him of a country fair.
Admits there's a lot of old dust
And the daylight is the color of sepia,
Just like on this picture postcard
With its two lovers chastely embracing
Against a painted cardboard sunset.

The result in several of Simic's poems here is a quality like a leech, but it begs the question that is actually provided on the back cover of the book: where does Simic get his inspiration? But to go further, what Simic chooses to focus on with those inspiring people, places, events, and objects (especially of ancient or recent art), either known or unknown to Simic, and what he does with that focus is what's really important--because the motif of the book represents the common identity of the blues, of that great musical and literary genre hybrid that many poets have attempted to have success in contributing to, but have ultimately either run into cliche without moving forward, or have been stuck allowing the reader to easily understand each piece. While Simic achieves very enduring poems that are short and sweet, but he also provides brilliantly accessible content that has universal qualities while remaining pointed, like an ancient sword, in the name of poetry. But when you reach down deeper, which is possible, you can find grittier stuff--you can trace the desperation in his voice--you can feel the cynicism and slightly-bent humor bubbling up from the surface--you can realize that the poems are poems but are also dialogues and monologues, with the audience as well as between Simic and himself.

On a final note, I think that the easiest criticism Unending Blues could take is through the book's form. The three sections have a vague movement (I will not try to prove this movement as I have not spent too much time tracking it) from urban environment to rural environment to a focus on art (in general). When you match poems that have comparable themes and literary qualities to one another, those poems in the same section or collection that are the odd ducks, so to speak, stand out, and in this book's case, there are several poems that do not work. But, while several lacking poems out of forty-four do not make a book perfect, it is pretty close. Compare a solid collection like this to a more contemporary collection, and you may be able to set off a light bulb as to why American poetry, at least in book form, is losing its edge and ultimately becoming a less powerful force.