Selected Early Poems

About this book

When this selection of Charles Simics work first appeared it was hailed as "easily the best volume of poetry published in 1985....Simic is one of the wisest poets of his generation and one of the best." (The Georgia Review) For this new edition of his selected poems Simic has added twenty-eight poems and extensively revised others making this the most complete collection available of his early work. In the spare haunting vision of these poems the familiar takes on a disturbing often sinister presence. A fork "resembles a birds foot / Worn around the cannibals neck" and a birds chirp is "Like a match flickering / In a new grave." Lifes horrors--violence hunger poverty illness--lurk unnervingly in the background. And yet despite the horror a sense of wonder pervades these poems transforming the ordinary world into a mysterious place of unknowable forces. Classic displays of the economy and grace of Simics work these poems occupy an established place in American poetry.