Customer Reviews (1)

excellent
This book remains one of my favorite collections of poems.It is good to begin with this book and read his next book...to view his work in sequence is like reading a wonderfully visual novel. ... Read more

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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).
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Customer Reviews (2)

"Then the coldly dawning suspicion--"
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.

Fun.
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. **** ... Read more

Product Description
Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic introduces and translates the poems of Serbian feminist, activist, and writer Radmila Lazic

Dead-born will be your wishes.
Your every hope will be a widow.
And as for love, there won't be enough
To spread on a slice of bread.
--from "Twilight Metaphysics"

Translated and introduced with the surrealist wit that is Charles Simic's signature, A Wake for the Living offers American readers, for the first time in English, the brilliance of Serbian poet Radmila Lazic. Through her compelling and strange leaps and dodges, Lazic describes an identity-personal and political-informed by catastrophe and victimization that restlessly and imaginatively swerves into irreverence and often-comic absurdity. "Goodness is boring," she writes, "It seems it's hell I'm getting myself ready for." These poems careen from the poet's lament for beauty faded to her "Dorothy Parker Blues" to her searching for names among obituaries to her sexual desires without obligation, with the virtuosity that has made her one of Eastern Europe's best and most vivacious contemporary poets.
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Customer Reviews (1)

Kindred Poets
I never expected to find a kindred spirit in Eastern Europe.

Radmila Lazic is a contemporary Serbian poet and the author of six poetry collections. She's edited two anthologies -- one of women's poetry, the other of anti-war letters -- and founded the journal, Profemina.

Until Nov. 23, 2003, I'd never heard of her.

Each year on my birthday, I go out to dinner, see a movie and buy a book of poetry. Finding the book is always my favorite activity. I enter the bookstore and amble over to the poetry shelves. After perusing through my favorites (Rilke, Poe, Gallagher, Frost, Keats, Shelley, Dickinson), I close my eyes and find a spot that feels right. Then I search the spines for a title that interests me. When I find one, I pull it out and flip through its pages, reading snippets of verse and rhyme to see if the words connect with me. The hunt continues until I find a dark jewel.

"A Wake for the Living," Lazic's first book of poetry translated from Serbian to English, was the third title I selected from the shelves this year. Within moments, I knew I needed to own this book.

Her writing was blunt, honest and pure. It was clear she understood my thoughts from thousands of miles away. ... Read more

Product Description
Charles Simic is one of the leading American poets now writing. His first collection, Dismantling the Silence, was published in 1971, and in the three decades that have followed he has received numerous awards and honours for his work. This selection, made by the author himself from forty years' work, is an outstanding overview of an astonishing poet. ... Read more

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Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic explores the love of imaging he and photographer Abelardo Morell share as both strive to reveal the ordinary in their work. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

astounding
Simply breathtaking. Amazing photographs from one of the most creative photographers of this generation. ... Read more

Product Description
A collection of verse by a Serbian-born poet who was brought up under Nazi occupation and since his teens has lived in the USA, where he has won many literary awards. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (4)

nuns and heroes
laure-anne bosselaar is one of the most gifted and moving poets of the past twenty years.seeing her read at Stockton College in December of 1999, I was moved to tears during more than one of her poems."MyLittle Sisters of Love and Misery," for example, evokes a beauty andpain that is both striking and poignant for it's attention to detail andlack of self-pity.She speaks for the women who cannot speak forthemselves, to the people in her life that she must forgive to survive, andto the world, she gives her unique view of love and laughter.herbrilliance lies in the important fact that she never feels the need tosacrifice her sense of humor to get at the tragedy of life, because sherealizes they are often one and the same.

when i met ms. bosselaar, shepinched my cheek and called me "dear poetry sister."it spokevolumes about the kind of person and writer that she is.here's hoping shecontinues to bless us with her unique gift.

dramatic and compassionate
These compelling narratives span post WWII Europe to contemporary USA -- the speaker, raised in a convent in Europe traces her life in the cruel environment of the convent to her married life here in this country. Thepoems are of daily life -- its joys and horrors. They are generous poems,long and meandering. They are accessible, always. Funny, sweet, scary andsumptuous.

compelling narratives that speed down the page.
Bosselaar's collection is electric. These narratives, often harrowing, speak the stories of many characters. The geographic and emotional terrain of this book is panoramic. This is a book of narratives that speed down thepage and take the reader on one hell of a ride.

An excellent treasuring of the world as it is.
"[N]o girls, no jokes, no wine// Is that what art demands?/ ... I can't endure such sullen habits, I want distraction,/ need my gaze to waver, wild as moths on my window: ... Let me be fickle as the Mistral, lazy as Provencal lizards;/ give me the nuances of tenderness,// longing's appetites, the pagan buzz of sex--and may my art/ be mortal ... a daily brush with grace."If the moral of mortality is treasuring the world, then moral intelligence is steeped in its particulars.Laure-Anne Bosselaar's poems make the case as art, or if you prefer, meditation--pagan Ignatian, procreative, or in its most inclusive, practical, caregiving sense, charitable.In modeled stanzas she recaptures good-burgher Nazi sympathizers, spent vegetable gardens, snowstorms, a fatally overinspired poem, her husband's morning Rorschach shock of graying hair, convent school underwear, her mother's Gauloises Bleues dipped in Chanel No. 5, and other coups de grace.The last poem celebrates Thanksgiving, an immigrants' feast, a fitting reminder that the book's language--in one of the author's adopted languages--is comfortably, confidently expressive.It's a good cook's English that savors the telling as well as the tale ... Read more

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A search for roots, humanity and survival in the gloom of recent Balkan history.

Poems are in verse, but also arranged as prose poems. The first section, "A Search for Roots," deals with the politics and cultural landscape of Macedonia, with beautiful portayals of nature and religious monuments. The second section, "Staring at Infinity," refers to classical archetypes, the battle of Troy and the story of Jesus. The last section, "Naked Life," speaks of the family in the midst of violence, devastation and confusion.

Illuminating notes clarify the complexity of the region and its tortured history. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent.
Charles Simic, Charon's Cosmology (George Braziller, 1977)
Charles Simic, Austerities (George Braziller, 1982)

These two of Simic's entries in the Braziller poetry series (his last before it shut down in 1978, and his second upon its resurrection) read as two parts of a whole, so it makes some sense to review them together. Charon's Cosmology, nominated for the National Book Award, is the shorter of the two by a few pages. The usual wit, wisdom, and irony to be found in Simic is here in spades, along with some wanderings down various life paths to find new ways of looking at things for the viewer's pleasure.

"...I look at times over his shoulder
At all that whiteness. The snow is falling,
As you'd expect. A drop of ink
Gets buried easily, like a footprint.

I too would get lost but there's his shadows
On the wall, like a perched owl...."
(--"Poem")

Austerities, published five years after Charon's Cosmology, could easily have been parts three through five of the same book. It has all the same strengths, and if it has a weakness it is that every once in a while the irony doesn't come off sounding quite as ironic as it should ("Positively Bucolic," for example, gets downright annoying in places-- as it is supposed to, but that doesn't lessen the annoyance). But when Simic is on, he is very, very on:

"Luckily, we had this Transylvanian waiter,
This ex-police sergeant, ex-dancing school instructor
Regarding whom we were in complete agreement
Since he didn't forget the toothpicks with the bill."
(--"East European Cooking")

Simic well deserves a spot in a canon as time progresses, and these two books will be an integral part of that.

Charon's Cosmology: **** ½
Austerities: **** ... Read more

Product Description
A postwar Serbian poet captures the spirit of the classical in his newly translated book of poems. ... Read more