Charles Simic Books

Readers of Charles Simic will not be disappointed in this collection and will find Ristovic's voice familiar. True, there may never have been a writer better than Simic at finding mystery (and sometimes even horror) in familiar things. But Ristovic makes his own contribution to that genre in "Old motif," where he asks, "For whom are you intended, wine in the corked bottle? / Through whose veins will you send your merry little flame, / making him behold the most ordinary things / in many strange and unaccustomed ways?"

However, perhaps the best comparison is not to Simic but to Czeslaw Milosz. Like many of Milosz's best poems, this book makes the most sense as a reaction against relativism, both moral and aesthetic. (Compare, for example, Ristovic's "Genesis according to the rules of universal poetics" with Milosz's "One More Day" in /Unattainable Earth/.) The discontentment, fear, and terror that follows when subjective will denies objective values finds expression in many of these poems, of which the best include "Purgatory" and "The essential." Chilling is Ristovic's statement that "fake evidence passed off as truth" is a thing "a dead man could be interested in."

Much of the humor Ristovic delights in follows from the absurdity of mixing the noble with the profane: In "Lavatory theatre," for example, Greek tragedy and the bathroom occupy the same dramatic space. But Ristovic never blurs the distinctions. The readers in the "Lavatory library" are those "for whom / Dante's or Homer's verses / and the writings of some scribbling nobody / have equal value."

In his introduction, Simic notes, "Many twentieth-century poets have believed in angels, but Ristovic may be the only one who believes in the devil." He appears to have put his finger on what makes these poems creep off the page in such a chilling and authentic way.