The World Doesn't End (Paperback)

~ (Author) "My mother was a braid of black smoke..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Yugoslavian-born Charles Simic, who came to the U.S. in 1954, is known as a creator of poetic fantasy. In this volume, he constructs bizarre, startling and entertaining visions in short descriptive sentences that pile one incongruous turn upon another, building images that are fresh and full of surprise. Like the river in one poem which flows backward, the power of Simic's inner world derives from turning logic on its head and taking a look from another direction. This collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1990.

From Publishers Weekly

A master of the absurd and the unexpected, Simic ( Unending Blues ) presents a collection of prose poems that will not fail to amuse and delight. Writing in a series of "short-take" lyrical sentences, he builds observation upon observation to create paragraphs that startle through the juxtaposition of images and gratify through the freshness of his vision. Never one to shy away from the bizarre or the prosaic, Simic carries his poems to their logical--or illogical--extremes: "The dead man steps down from the scaffold. He holds his bloody head under his arm . . . he takes a seat at one of the tables at the tavern and orders two beers, one for him and one for his head." The poems move seamlessly between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and, although one often puzzles to draw conclusions from his fantastic verse, readers will not lose interest or the sense of pleasant surprise at the end of each work. The poem quoted in part above, for example, concludes powerfully: "It's so quiet in the world. One can hear the old river, which in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards."
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Harvest Books (March 14, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156983508
• ISBN-13: 978-0156983501
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #238,059 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mind-bogglingly good., March 8, 2004

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

Charles Simic, The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990)

Charles Simic won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The World Doesn't End, and it is blessedly easy to see why. This collection (which, despite its subtitle, is mostly prose poems, with a few "regular" poems thrown in for good measure) could easily be a primer for the aspiring poet on exactly how to write a prose poem. (Would that more who attempt it had read this!) In the days when prose poetry has fallen so far from the poetic tree that a new subgenre, "flash fiction," had to be invented for the mass of the unpoetic claptrap, Simic gives us a book full of wonderful tall tales, flights of fancy, and utterly poetic language, all without ever once straying from the idea that what he is writing in these small pieces is, in fact, poetry.

"The dog went to dancing school. The dog's owner sniffed vials of Viennese air. One day the two heard the new Master of the Universe pass their door with a heavy step. After that, the man exchanged clothes with his dog. It was a dog on two legs, wearing a tuxedo, that they led to the edge of the common grave. As for the man, blind and deaf as he came to be, he still wags his tail at the approach of a stranger." --untitled (p. 40)

The World Doesn't End caused me to re-evaluate my ideas on what poetry is. Perhaps it is not, as Eliot would have it, language elevated; perhaps, instead, it is language as it should be. The standard as opposed to the elevation, the diction we should be striving for in our daily lives.

The finest book of poetry to cross my desk since Reznikoff's classic By the Waters of Manhattan half a decade ago. Must reading for poetry fans, and engaging stuff in prose form for those who don't do poetry. Just think of it as the best flash fiction ever written. In any case, whatever you have to do to convince yourself to do so, read this book. *****

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A landmark volume of poetry, August 8, 1998

By	Rishi K. Agrawal (Arlington, VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is one of the best books of poetry that has been published in the past 15 years. The strength of this Pulitzer Prize-winning volume comes from its deceptive simplicity. The prose poems are easy and fun to read, but Simic can get very strange very fast. One poem starts, "We were so poor I had to take the place of the bait in the mousetrap." On one level, a delightful line. On another level, it is a disturbing image. In the same poem, as the mouse nibbles on his ear, the mouse whispers, "These are dark and evil days." The juxtaposition of the levity and the darkness creates a landmark volume of poetry, truly an essential book.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of Simic's Best, January 31, 2006

By	D. Miller (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The World Doesn't End surprised me in many ways. It was unlike any other volume of his work I have yet read. I was so enthralled I read it cover to cover twice in the first week after I received it. I would have to say that this volume and Simic's "A Wedding in Hell" are two of my favorite volumes of poetry by any poet. Simic has a gift for combining the grotesque/bizarre with the everyday and condensing them down into compact poems that evoke the experience of lucid dreams. I highly recommend this small book!