Charles Simic Books

Italian author, winner of the Novel Prize in 1934, Luigi Pirandello is better known for his plays, forerunners of the theatre of the absurd. In this novel, the main character Mattia Pascal faces an economic downfall and a marriage without love. He decides to escape from this situation and in a stroke of luck wins a fortune in Monte Carlo. He takes a new identity, gains total freedom, shams death but the ghosts of his past existence, and the discovery of true love will spoil his new life.
The plot is neatly constructed and the dialogues between Mattia Pascal and some of the characters are enlightening, expressing Pirandello's philosophical outlook on life as well as reflecting biographical elements. The author is concerned with the ambiguity of truth and reality, the problem of identity and illusion. For him self-identity only exists in relation to others, as much as man is a social creature, unfortunately bound to social conventions. Man creates his own reality and lives in a world of illusions, always bound one way or the other to the past. The resulting paradox is that illusion may often become more real than reality!
Mattia Pascal is unable to cope with his total freedom which strucks him as being shapeless and aimless. Only the love he feels for Adriana will help him brake away from his suffocating mask. Upon returning to his former town he finds his wife has remarried and he is destined to become the shadow of a dead man.
Pirandello held a pessimistic outlook on life, believeing that his time was one of distress and darkeness (early 20th century), democracy was nothing more than tyranny disguised as freedom, and philosophical speculations nothing more than a product of our imagination.
"When death comes perpetual night will great us after the misty daylight of our illusion, or rather, we will be left to the mercy of Being, which will only have shattered the vain forms of our reasoning."

Okay, so that may sound awfully obvious, but my goodness! Of course it's not funny! It's not supposed to be funny! When is Pirandello ever funny? If anything, he may be ironic, but he is never slapstick and certainly wrote nothing to be considered "a lark." The author of the article in Publisher's Weekly ought to be taken out and shot in the most General Dreedle sense of the term. Il Fu Mattia Pascal is anything but a beach read and if you were disappointed in it because it was not cheap entertainment, your disappointment is probably due to the misinformation you received from a review as miscomprehending as that of Publisher's Weekly. Il Fu is an examination of the modern treatment of identity. It is an existential examination of society's abandonment of those who seek to live an "authentic" life. It is a piece of LITERATURE, not a DaVinci Code or a Mary Higgins Clark mystery. These may be enjoyable books, but for a different reason. Read Pirandello with expectation that you will be made to think, to question, and you will not be disappointed.

This book is very sad...it tells the story of a man who can't cope whit life's responsibilities and whit himself. A strange accident causes him to be believed dead, and he thinks he can assume a new identitiy and take on a new life. But he can't escape himself, and his new life shall be as unsatisfying and full of disillusions as the first. The clou of the book is the tragic melancholy of the seance...when he himself is evoked as his own spirit.Existentially spooky!

I would definetely recommend this novel. I enjoyed it very much. It helped me to come in contact with my innerself, and it made me think of things that i had never given any thought to before.

This novel is about the identity of the individual, and the possibilities and limits of self-reinvention. By failing to transform himself into someone else, Mattia Pascal remains the same person, but radically changed from his experience. Oh, but it's not so complicated. Mattia Pascal is a good-for nothing- junior who, along with his also-spoiled brother, lose the fortune inherited from their father. Besides losing his fortune, Mattia is forced to make a disastrous marriage. And then, along comes a big and most unexpected chance to run away and become someone else. I won't spoil anything. Just read it and you will find an amazing story. Pirandello's writing is easy. The introduction to the real knot of the story is a little long, but it is absolutely necessary to situate the plot, and moreover, it is very funny. Pirandello's style fluctuates between irreverent and outrageous irony, and melancholic reflections on fate, identity and man's place in the world. Far from being boring, it has extremely funny moments of dark humor (check his confrontations with his mother-in-law). So, it is an extremely recommendable book, because it is intelligent humor with a reflection on life. If you really get to love the story, as I did, you'll end up asking to yourself: "Who the hell am I?".

Charles Simic's surreal writing is fun, humorous, intellectually interesting, but still menacing. Each poem is like a cage with a rabid guinea pig inside, & you can't stop yourself from reaching in & petting it.

Having only read *looking for trouble* and *frightening toys* i clearly had the disadvantage of reading a selection of his best poems before this collection of new poems. I bought the book last week and was expecting the usual simplistic beauty (unlike Hemingway,unlike Kafka,contrary to popular reviews)and that is exactly what i got, and indeed loved all over again. Yes, repatition is evident, but, i might add, still effective, strangely imaginative, and still one of the only reasons to continue reading and buying poetry, even in its modern decline. Most of todays poetry is bland and boring; most new poets are lifeless idiots trapped in bizzare romantasims with the world....*Jackstraws* is one of the few breaths that keeps this dying medium breathing.

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.

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. ****

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.

There were few poems in here that I actually found romantic. With all the good reviews, I even went back and read it again in case I was just in a bad mood when I read it the first time. But, no, my first impressions was the same.
Lee Ann Brown's "After Sappho" was the best. That was because it echoed my own experience with my wife of now 35 years ago. I also liked Catherine Wagner's "Lover" about going back in time and loving various people in literary history. Most of the others just passed me by.
I'm listening to the CD with the love songs as I write this. It's better than the book.

Saddened by the losses? Try this swell anthology. It will make the room glow back at you with convivial company and music. I think a lot, it gets me through, and this is perfect for the bathroom, the bedroom, the windowseat overlooking the construction site. You come across as a horse in touch with intoxicants. Listen: A lot of energy, nerve, tenderness and fashion comes crammed between these pages, and even though it doesn't announce itself as such, what we have here, Doctor, is a case of practically every younger poet you really ought to know about. Brace yourself for a big bag of caramels.

Terrific anthology boasting most of the most pleasant younger poets publishing nowadays. With an ultracool music CD in the bargain, it's chance-free really. You deserve this, dearheart.

Charles Simic's "Walking The Black Cat" is hard evidence that the sarcastic, irreverent and consciousness bending spirit of surrealism is alive and well. Simic's tone is flippant and unmistakably poetic; he can take the most ordinary situation and make a slick, subtle metaphysical comment about it ("On the Sagging Porch" is one of the best examples of this, as he takes a local president of the SPCA in a few beautiful stanzas makes Judas out of him). In fact he seems to have a better grasp of what the oft used and abused word "surreal" means then a lot of the original surrealists themselves; these poems are not word games or pretty images, but both employed into substantive, moving poetry that sticks to the mind. I think this collection as much as "The World Doesn't End" deserved the Pulitzer Prize. Anyone who loves challenging, consciousness altering poetry will become a devotee of Simic.

Charles Simic, Walking the Black Cat (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1996)

Pulitzer Prizewinning author Charles Simic is to dada what Clayton Eshleman is to surrealism; he's pretty much the sole light keeping it alive in the world of poetry in the present day. Simic, a hardcore imagist, is wonderfully precise in his use of concrete detail, which he then pulls completely out of the realm of reality by juxtaposing things which have no business being next to one another. Walking the Black Cat, a finalist for the National Book Award, is often considered one of Simic's finest works, and justly. There is much here to be enjoyed, mulled over, surprised at, and delighted with, and very little that dips below the level of brilliant. If you've never discovered the Joy of Simic, this is a fantastic place to start. ****

Blue collar poetry. Subtle and haunting, Charles Simic sets out, one rainy, Sunday afternoon, to take the innards out of life, and play with them as a child would play with an Erector Set. Very satisfying and original

Charles Simic, The Book of Gods and Devils (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990)

Another fine piece of work from Mr. Simic, but this one seems the smallest of cuts below his best efforts (The World Doesn't End, Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, et al). Hard to explain why this is; I want to say it's more in the confessional mode than most of his work, but if this is the case, it's by an infinitesimal amount and would not otherwise be worth noting. Problem is, I can't put my finger on anything else.

Still, when Simic is in the zone, his writing eclipses most others who have worked in the medium in the twentieth century. Take, for example, pieces from the brilliant "The Great War":

"...You never saw anything as beautiful
As those clay regiments; I used to lie on the floor
For hours, staring them in the eyes.
I remember them staring back at me in wonder.

How strange they must have felt
Standing stiffly at attention
Before a large, incomprehending creature
With a moustache made of milk...."

Definitely another worthwhile contribution to the canon, but there are better places for the neophyte to begin. ****

The Book of Gods and Devils is one of my favorite books of poetry... It's absolutely fabulous! It has a touch of melancholy, humor, to be sure, and wonderful imagery... we dance with religious icons shamelessly! Wonderful!

This book is all right if you're just discovering Simic, but if you're adding it to a collection it's not an essential buy. Despite the dust jacket's promise it doesn't deliver in the way of new or revised material, and the choice of poems mirrors too much the older (and cheaper) compilation, Selected Poems. Most of Simic's books are available and very affordable in paperback, and once you get to know him, you'll want them all. The "greatest hits" package here is optional.

Anyone who is interested in the breadth, playfulness and imagistic intensity of contemporary American poetry needs to buy this book. Simic's early poems--surreal and yet rooted many times in the commonalities of life--are sparse yet full of surprises. These poems, when I was an undergrad, changed the way I THOUGHT about poetry, what it could accomplish. Nearly devoid of literary pretentions, Simic's poetry is nonetheless artful, using slang, riddles and the like to construct his worlds-within-poems. Simic later wrote a book called Dimestore Alchemy on the work of Joseph Cornell and I couldn't think of a better description than 'dimestore alchemy' for his own poetry. Few books are essentials, but this is one of them, a certified desert-island book for poets and lovers of poetry.

I've read two translations of Popa's works. Some individual poems were in both collections. This translation was far better--more poetic. The other may have been more literal, I don't know (it's called "Collected Poems"). This one appears to reflect the poet's feelings. It's quite beautiful as well as frequently profound. I discovered Popa by listening to the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago audiotape, "The Yawn of Yawns: On the Psychology of Revelation--An Exploration of the Poetry of Vasko Popa" by Josip Pasic. The tape's catalog description states: "the work of te great 20th century Slavic poet...talks about the most basic geometry of the human mind--the archetype of archetypes." It's great. The translator has done a wonderful service to the English reading public.

This is an incredible collection of poetry by Vasko Popa -- an incredible European poet. The poems are very surreal; it is required to read each poem at least three times in order to grasp its meaning. Each poem has a beautiful and strange world of its own. Plus, there is a lot of magical realism in this book, which is something I always look for in literature.

My favorite Popa poems are "Ashes," "Hunters," and "Heaven's Ring." I also love the Little Box series, especially "The Owners of the Little Box," "The Tenants of the Little Box," and "The Enemies of the Little Box."

This is -- by no stretch of doubt -- the best book of poetry I have ever owned. Charles Simic's translation is excellent; I marvel at his ability to convert beautiful poems into a language that I can appreciate and understand. I highly recommend this incredible book!

There isn't a better collection of poetry with magical realism than this one! I marvel at Charles Simic's ability to translate such complicated and beautiful poetry. I love all of the poems in this book, especially Desanka Maksimovic's "Bloody Fable," Vasko Popa's "Proud Error," and "There Smoke, Sooty Smoke," from a collection of Women's Songs. Do you love poetry with surreal and dark messages? Then I suggest that you get this incredible book!

Charles Simic, ed., The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry (Graywolf, 1992)

This is one of the better anthologies of verse I've come across in quite a while. Simic, a native Serbian himself, has an obvious love for his subject and, one would assume, a greater knowledge of history and cultural context than a translator going in fresh with this material. As any translator worth his salt will tell you, these qualities are the difference between a translation with falls flat and one which breathes; word choice is everything.

The "name" here (to Western audiences, anyway) is Milorad Pavic, whose novel The Dictionary of the Khazars was a literary sensation in the late eighties, translated into many languages and finding the bestseller lists of a number of western countries. But once you've been drawn by the name, linger over the rest of the work here. The whole collection shines with a sophisticated grasp of the surrealist ethic which much of modern American poetry is lacking; many of the poets here, such as Vasco Popa and Ivan Lalic, would stand at the same level of achievement as Eshleman, Willis, or Stroffolino on the short shelf of sacred books, where modern surrealism is concerned.

If there is a quibble to be had with the book, it's that it's simply too short. Simic does explain this in his foreword (he only included the translations he's most satisfied with as a poet as well as a translator). Thus, we have to be happy with what we have and hope he releases a volume 2 some time in the future. *** ½

Simic has selected a fine array of poetry for this volume. The only problem is that the volume suffers from lack of ambition. There are simply not enough poets represented nor poems representative of Serbian writing. Otherwise, I loved this book, but I felt it needed to be more expansive.

Overall this is an excellent overview. Particularly I note the poet Ivan Lalic (and the exquisite poem "Love in July") and also the poet Novica Tadic who employs rather disturbing and disconnected imagery in his poetry. Most interesting (and well known) is the poem entitled "Jesus." Brief but thought provoking.

Deserving of praise, this volume, as stated, needs to be of greater length.

THis is THE book for Big Breast lovers, which, in this modern age, is a relatively rare phenomenon.

Perhaps not quite what we expected. We (my girlfriend and I) are both interested in what roles the breast plays in sociology and in culture, and hoped this book would grant us some fresh perspectives.

There are very interesting and provocative (but I certainly wouldnt call them erotic by any means) images in this book, as well as some fascinating art. Some of it we really would love to have framed.

The images are suitable for anyone to look at, with only a few being tantalizing or vaguely... scintillating. It's the kind of book that is good to read sitting down with company and see how you and others react. Perfectly suitable for a bookshelf or coffeetable.

To use the words of Meema Spadola, breasts are symbols of sexuality, motherhood, and power. This book by Prose and Simic explores the spectrum of possibilities in this wide range of meanings. This is, though, photographic ART. Those who think that art should be readily pleasurable, appreciated, or liked may find themselves challenged by this format. If you feel that art should be challenging, you may find this book appealing. On viewing it one may be stimulated by novel and sometimes not necessarily pleasurable thoughts. This seems to contradict the implication in the title that there is something necessarily `titillating" here. (Certainly the concept seems to stretch more common notion what is exciting, nasty and fun). For that I would deduct two stars.

One appeal of Simic's work is its deceptive ease: it appears lighter than it is, like Bob Dylan's lyrics although not as funny. To some extent Simic does this to clear room for his famed moralism, since these days the only way that people permit you to go holy on them is if you sucker them into it. He doesn't delve into deep shades of grey - lines like "And then there were no more/As we stood dazed in the burning city,/But, of course, they didn't film that" (in "Cameo Appearance") don't force readers to question their own beliefs. But such lines are moving, because he doesn't use his lived experience as a plea for sympathy; instead, he means to use his experience to broaden ours.

The fact that Simic's verse is somewhat rhythmless (but for the line breaks) means that when a failure occurs, you don't just roll past it. For instance, "Evening Chess" ("The Black Queen raised high/In my father's angry hand") clunks because it exists entirely in meanings we've possessed before tackling the poem; all Simic does is bring them to the surface, where they dissolve as soon as we try to make something out of them. On the other hand, this style allows him to build intensity with little strain on the reader, as in "Street of Jewelers", where colour and light briskly accumulate in the back of the mind - it's not until the poem ends that you notice the radiance.

The strongest section of this likely to be award-winning collection comes from "The Book of Gods and Devils", worth looking into in its own right although the key poems are here, foremost among them "Shelley", which is up with "The Lesson" at the summit of his work. In "Shelley", the narrator reads "mellifluous verses" while describing New York street scenes, finally revealing that for him, reading and observance are both forms of short-term relief from isolation. The selections from "Hotel Insomnia" and "A Wedding in Hell", slightly more obvious in their darkness ("Paradise Motel" begins: "Millions were dead; everybody was innocent"), are also of high standard. Thereafter there's a perceptible decline - some of his idiosyncrasies are muted, although the language in poems like "Night Picnic" ("There was the sky, starless and vast-/Home of every one of our dark thoughts") is its own reward. Still, it's a relief that the new poems - especially "Little Night Music" ("I could think of nothing to say./The music over, the night cold") and "The Museum Opens at Midnight" - stand up to the rest of the book. In terms of usefulness, one of the best poetry collections of the year.

This book is primarily a selection of poems from Simic's books from Unending Blues (1986) through Jackstraws (1999) with 19 additional new poems. As such, it is an excellent volume to introduce Simic but scarce on new poems for his avid fans.

Simic's poems are interesting to analyze - so few traditional "poetic devices," so much reference to religion, philosophy and other tough issues, primarily in common-place language. Simic, however, makes this work in his surrealistic way. My definition of "work?" - poems that one reads and rereads by choice.

An example:
"... The way she appears in a window hours later
To set the empty bowl
And spoon on the table,
And then exits
So that the day may pass
And the night may fall

Into the empty bowl,
Empty room, empty house, ..."


Simic takes the commonplace words and actions and deftly turns them into an unusual perspective, in this case, day and night being dependent upon "her" actions. Or night falling into something i.e. empty bowl. There are occasional misteps where I as reader find a phrase jarring, unable to slide into Simic's image. There are poems I enjoy, but don't ask me what it means. But most of all there are poems that confront real religious and philosophical issues as they present themselves in life - without any easy or trite answers.

Charles Simic, The Voice at 3:00 A.M. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 2003)

Simic's latest collection is something of a shortcut, a "new and selected poems" that has all the cache of a band releasing "greatest hits, volume 3" with one new track to entice the fans to buy it. If you've already got the bulk of the books Simic released between 1986 (Unending Blues) and 1999 (Jackstraws), the question is whether you want to shell out the cash for the small section of new poems. My advice, wait for the paperback.

For those who have not yet been introduced to the wonder that is Charles Simic, however, this is a great way to get an overview of his recent work. Probably best read in tandem with Selected Early Poems (or his best early volume, Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk) for the full treatment. Either way, though, Simic is one of the finest American writers extant, and getting to know him will not only enrich your life, but give you something cool to talk about at boring society parties. Highly recommended. ****