Jackstraws: Poems (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Who put canned laughter Into my crucifixion scene?..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

By now, Simic's matter-of-fact tossings off of the gothic, the banal and the absurd are so familiar that it's hard to know when he's putting us on. In this 13th collection, less allusive and lighter in tone than the Pulitzer Prize-winning Walking the Black Cat, "store windows with out-of-business signs" replace "The famous no-shows,/ Truth, Justice, and so forthA" as the poet leads us through blackly comic scenes from post-industrial America's weedy sidewalks and abandoned lots. The "big topics" often get upstaged by images of small annoyancesAflies, spiders and insects win a surprising amount of attention by climbing religious statues, crawling under the napkins of drag queens eating pot roast and provoking mock admiration: "Teeny dadaists on the march,/ You're sly and most witty/ As you disrupt my rare moments/ Of calm." But most of Simic's short, anecdotal lyrics coax depth by skewing ordinary activities, as when depicting lovers "running drenched/ Past the state prison with its armed guards/ Silhouetted in their towers against the sky," or an "evening sunlight" that would corner the speaker, "to tell me so much,/ To tell me absolutely nothing." The long sequences that end the collectionA"The Toy, "Talking to the Ceiling" and "Mystic Life"Aare among his best: promisingly experimental in structure, crammed with bits of conversation, off-center quips, invocations and definitions ("Memory, all-night's bedside tatto artist") that rise above the quotidian world they alternately parody and celebrate. Simic's sly and precocious speakers are at their best when showing us "how quiet the world gets,/ When you roll your eyes back and look."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

With James Tate, Mark Strand, and others, Simic led American poetry's turn toward surrealism in the late 1960s, establishing an eerily disjunctive but imagistically arresting style. Today the Yugoslavia-born poet and 1989 Pulitzer Prize winner continues resolutely along the same antilogical, irreverent path, but that path is now deeply worn, and surprise is less easily evoked. While Simic sets up unpredictable scenes that blend the comic with the ominous ("A pastry chef carrying a lit birthday cake/ Found himself in the blinding snowstorm"), he also falls prey to an awkwardness of phrasing that can read like an unsteady translation ("The smoke that was like the skirts/ Slit on the side to give the legs freedom/ To move while dancing the tango/ Past ballroom mirrors on page 1944"). Some endings seem tacked on or settled for, as if the poet had lost interest in the dream. Like any dream journal, Jackstraws is a mixture of hits and misses, not without invention but unlikely to add substantially to Simic's established reputation.AFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; First Edition edition (April 20, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151004226
• ISBN-13: 978-0151004225
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #943,373 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fine stuff., June 28, 2004

By	Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Cleveland, OH) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Jackstraws: Poems (Paperback)

Charles Simic, Jackstraws (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1999)

I've written so many glowing words about Charles Simic in the past year that anything more would really be superfluous (cf. reviews of The World Doesn't End, Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, Classic Ballroom Dances, Charon's Cosmology, etc. etc.). All I can really say about Jackstraws is "another worthy entry in the corpus of Mr. Simic, which is already stacked full of quality material." Every new book from Charles Simic is an unalloyed pleasure to read, full of little unexpected pleasures and twists of phrase that cannot help but delight the reader. If you're not familiar with the work of Mr. Simic, I cannot but urge you to become so at your earliest opportunity; the man should be a living legend. As it is, he's just another poet trying to eke out a living, and that's a crime. ****

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very DEEP, February 22, 2002

By	Timothy Cade (Houston, Texas USA) - See all my reviews

My favorite poem is Vacant Rooms and I'm using it for my poetry memorization project this spring in my Intro to Poetry class. I am impressed by the depth, which Simic uses so easily and bluntly. Upon first readings of these poems it may seem that is simply what the title states, but when you think about it slowly and read each line and visualize the concepts and connect each image with the next, it opens the flood gates for the imagination to wonder and get lost in a thousand interpretations that bring enjoyment and fun to the poem. Even if the poem is sad, it is an excellent feeling to comprehend the power behind the words.
It truly is a beautiful collection, I only hope that one day I can write as good as him and create that depth behind the words to make them stand out among the rest.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still going strong, April 8, 1999

By A Customer

For the first time my friend Charlie is beginning to get a few negative reviews. I'm here to dispell the rumors that he has lost his touch. This book, as well as his last, Walking the Black Cat, is evidence that he is still one of the best. The main contention has been that the typical Simic surprises are no longer surprising, that he has repeated himself one too many times. There isn't a single poet who isn't guilty of this poetic crime, and there are times that Charlie does come very close to sounding like the Charlie of old. Yet I still think the ultimate judgement comes not in a comparative judgement of a poem or group of poems against the entire body of work (though it is useful to do so), but whether single poems stand on their own. This is, of course, hard to do given the poet's intentions to group poems into the volumes that he/she makes available to the public--we can only judge by what we are given. But poems like "Live at Club Revolution" are fresh because of the odd combination of images Charlie is known for. The address is similar, the reference to a nightclub as a setting for an historical event is also something we've come across in Charlie's poems before. But once the poem begins it bears little to no resemblance to any other. And this is interesting to note considering that once, quite a few years ago, Charlie wrote another poem with the title "Jackstraws," which bears no resemblance to the title poem of this volume. Yet the game itself the title comes from illustrates a thematic interest that is ongoing; that one stumbles upon a scene of such quiet and danger--whether the danger of upsetting a pile of sticks delicately placed on a table in a game much like Jenga, or the real danger of those war scenes Charlie has become so famous for remembering--is something that must be visited over and over, yet never without some kind of subversion. To deceive oneself into a feeling of safety, joy, fear--this is the aim of his language.