Master of Disguises

by Charles Simic

In his first volume of poetry since his tenure as poet laureate, Charles Simic shows he is at the height of his poetic powers. These new poems mine the rich strain of inscrutability in ordinary life, until it is hard to know what is innocent and what ominous. There is something about his work that continues to be crystal clear and yet deeply weighted with violence and mystery. Reading it is like going undercover. The face of a girl carrying a white dress from the cleaners with her eyes half-closed. The Adam & Evie Tanning Salon at night. A sparrow on crutches. A rubber duck in a shooting gallery on a Sunday morning. And someone in a tree swing, too old to be swinging and to be wearing no clothes at all, blowing a toy trumpet at the sky.

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008

Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.

Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years.

Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very special, bonus Wilco edition of this review will follow the closing credits of the primary review

Eternity, the quiet one, listening in.

I have always found it amusing that Charles Simic was honored with the position of US Poet Laureate during the George W. Bush administration. While Simic's poetry wouldn't be typically assessed as 'political', there is still a left-leaning philosophy that seems hidden it the heart of it. Master of Disguise, his 12th collection, released in 2010, finds Simic at his most political as the book frequently spirals back towards anti-war sentiments and the dread that the world as damned. Simic so eloquently captures the time in which it was written, when the US was in a shitty war—something that hits hard for me as I recall watching my generation, my friends and classmates go off to fight and many never coming home alive. I look back on that time with frustration having been vocally opposed to the war and having the deaths of my friends shoved in my face as why I was wrong to think we shouldn’t be there and feeling unheard when yelling “they’d still be here if we didn’t go over there!” But I digress. Full of his signature wry, ironic humor and soothing surrealism, Master of Disguise is a bold, loud voice that stands out even in a choir of his award-winning and experimental collections.

And Who are You, Sir?
I'm just a shuffling old man,
Ventriloquizing
For a god
Who hasn't spoken to me once.

The one with the eyes of a goat
Grazing alone
On some high mountain meadow
In the long summer dusk.

Simic never fails to impress, dazzle and delight. Each metaphor is a gift and always surprising. He has a true knack for finding the abstract soul within all things, the true essence if you will, and presenting it in an equally abstract, weightless manner that best serves it and the understanding of it. 'Everyone wants to paraphrase a poem,' Simic once wrote, 'except the poet.' Poetry at its best says something that is equally light and otherworldly as the essence of its subject, and to explain it in simple form would be like touching the wings of a butterfly—it would crumble and stain your fingers with the shame at having destroyed something beautiful. That said, with 11 previous collections, this one doesn't stray far from the typical Simic themes and motifs and initially just seems like more of the same. Not that this is bad, who doesn't love the way Simic can describe a tree, the morning light, or a desolate road, for instance.

Keep This to Yourself
There are country roads now that are empty.
They'll hold on to the light of the day
A bit longer, mindful some boy
May be heading home after a game.

Whoever he is, he'll have to hurry.
This lovely moment won't last long.
The road before him lies white
Here and there under the dark trees,

As if some mad girl in the neighborhood
Had emptied her linen closet
and had been spreading her things
Over the soft late-summer dust.

A closer reading of the book reveals a beautiful heart in the poetry and lets you know it isn't as phoned-in as originally seemed (or as this review is [for more of the subject, see review below]). While Simic often looks back at the war of his childhood that chased his family from Europe, in this collection we see him look about the war raging in his adulthood over in the Middle East, and occasionally a blend of the two to allow them to comment on one another. Or sometimes it is a universal message, such as soldiers never returning to their families, where it is irrelevant which war is being discussed because it is all war, all bloodshed, all sadness coming 'Out of a bad dream's / smoldering ruins'. Simic hits hard here, and really drives the collection towards wonderful heights.
5/5

Driving Home
Minister of our coming doom, preaching
On the car radio, how right
your hell and damnation sound to me
As I travel these small, bleak roads
Thinking of the mailman's son
The Army sent back in a sealed coffin.

His house is around the next turn.
A forlorn mutt sits in the yard
Waiting for someone to come home.
I can see the TV is on in the living room,
Canned laughter in the empty house
Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.

The Wilco edition, reviewed in Wilco terms
Master of Disguise is similar to the second half of Wilco's career. The first half of the career tends a bit towards a generic poet/band of the times but has enough uniqueness and non-repeatable genius flaring up to keep you coming back from more. There have been cool breaking off moments, such as Simic's anthology of Serbian poetry, or his fantastic Dime-Store Alchemy which consisted of poems about the works of Joseph Cornell as Jeff Tweedy did his Mermaid Avenue out of Woody Guthrie songs. Nothing in Master of Disguises really reaches out from safe, familiar territory; the days of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot experimentation in form or as in The World Doesn't End are now back-catalog, and what we have is an artist confidant in their abilities doing what they do best. As in albums like Wilco: The Album or Sky Blue Sky, you find Simic writing a great Simic poem, or Wilco writing a good Wilco song. It's all like a caricature of itself with Simic hitting all the right notes and all the fun tree imagery, because that is what he does. You may give it a few listens, then toss it aside with a half-hearted sigh because, though you find things to enjoy, it just feels phoned-in (this review could also be done in Beck terms with this as a Modern Guilt of sorts and World being the wonderful Midnight Vultures). However, weeks later you give it a few more goes and suddenly it never leaves you, you can't stop and won't stop listening and you realize it was like a muffin with enough nooks and crannies to let the butter in if you go looking for them. Suddenly what seemed to be just towing the line feels fresh and exciting. Master of Disguise is Simic doing what Simic does best, and rocking it well while being a soulful War on War.

yes, Pete, this review is dedicated to you. And some quotes should probably be credited to you. Thanks man.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Out of a bad dream's
Smoldering ruins,
A flight of crows'
Bloodied and dripping wings

Soared high over me
This morning
Like flying scissors
Snipping at threads,

Making my puppet head
Jerk sideways,
My feet jitterbug
On the patch of ice in the yard.

[Stephen Kiernan · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you only ever read one book by this former US poet laureate, who died Jan 9, this would be a good one. This, or The World Doesn't End -- though I prefer this book because the poems are direct, comprehensible, and full of surprises.

Simic's poems won the Pulitzer once and were runner up twice, because his verses read like lyrical ambushes. Here's an indelible image, here's a good simple line, and suddenly there is something unexpected, dark or ominous or sublime.

You never saw it coming, yet it fits perfectly. And you find yourself circling back, at the end of the poem, asking yourself what happened, as if it were a mystery, though everything took place in broad daylight.

It is a unique genius, and Simic had a unique voice.

Here, for example is the entirety of his poem The Melon:

There was a melon fresh from the garden
So ripe the knife slurped
As it cut it into six slices.
The children were going back to school.
Their mother, passing out paper plates,
Would not live to see the leaves fall.

I remember a hornet, too, that flew in
Through the open window
Mad to taste the sweet fruit
While we ducked and screamed,
Covered our heads and faces,
And sat laughing after it was gone.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s been a while since I read this. I finished it back in November and wanted to make sure I gave it a fair shake in the review, so I was waiting until I had time to write one. Lesson learned: You will never have time to write an adequate review for a book. Ever.

I know that several of my other goodreads friends out there have encountered this lesson time and time again. It’s still frustrating.

Master of Disguises was a good book of poetry. I’d read an enjoyed Simic’s Sixty Poems enough that I could pick up another collection of his.

Like a lot of modern poetry, Simic is readable and unpretentious. He’s verbose enough to prove he can be, without seeming arrogant and show-offy.

Several poems and lines appear to be written specifically for me. They spoke to me, if you will. “The Elusive Something” is the feeling we’ve all had from time to time, but can’t nail down why. “Old Soldier,” starting with “By the time I was five,/ I had fought in hundreds of battles,” is a brilliant piece of work. “The Melon” speaks to the trivialities that stay in our memory when we don’t realize a defining moment in that moment.

My favorite poem, though may be “Private Miseries” which focuses on the guilt we feel at feeling miserable, when we see those less fortunate than ourselves. What right have we?

I try not to read to deeply into the meanings of poems. It is enough that they put me in the mood to write poetry. (So much so that I joined the ¡Poetry! group here on goodreads... in fact I was planning on posting a poem I’d written along with this review – which is why I didn’t write it for so long. Count your blessings you’re not reading that piece of.)

I always try to be careful when dissecting poetry. I thought of a great analogy, all on my own: it’s like dissecting a butterfly. You’ll be left with one of two things – a deeper understanding of a poem you love, or a pile of scraps that you now understand, but no longer look beautiful.

*Side note* I did come up with that analogy on my own... but then when I searched for “butterfly dissection” for some research for the poem I was writing about dissecting poetry it appears that a thousand people had come up with that analogy before me. So much so that my novel idea wasn’t only unoriginal, it was so unoriginal it had become cliché. (Which is the other reason that poem won’t appear in this review. Thanks a lot you multitudes.)

*Other side note* Sorry about the rant. The book is worth picking up.

[Mohammad Ali Shamekhi · Rating 2 out of 5]

مجموعه ی شعری متوسط به بالایی است، جاهایی ابهام دارد و ترجمه هم جاهایی باید ویرایش شود - البته ترجمه قابل خواندن است و با یک ویرایش درست می شود. اگر ترجمه ی بهتر بود واقعا می تونست مجموعه ی خوبی با سه ستاره باشه

اشعاری که من خیلی جالب یافتمشون "چشمان سنجاق شده"، "خربزه" و "2-شعر" بودند. در درجه ی بعد "زوج سالخورده"، "اعجوبه"، "پرده ی نقالی"، "نمایشگاه محلی"، "سنگ"، "شرح نسبی"، "لحظه ی متعالی" هم جالب بودند

[Monte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Graveside Oration

Our late friend hated blue skies,
Bible-quoting preachers,
Politicians kissing babies,
Women who are all sweetness.

He likes drunks in church,
Nudists playing volleyball,
Stray dogs making friends,
Birds singing of fair weather as they crap.

[Diya · Rating 4 out of 5]

(I wrote this for a class once, so might as well post it)

I always feel safe inside a Charles Simic poem. In a universe peopled by characters who shuffle about performing small acts of dying, who interact in ways that remind us of how soon they will be alone in the kitchen again, reheating hours-old tea, and of how abruptly a poem always ends, there is a pure conviction of voice. Simic places his reader in an environment which is morbid and at times violent, but somehow gives us the assurance that we’re going to make it to the other side of the poem safely.

Master of Disguises contains the poems I’ve come to associate with Simic: jarring, darkly unsettling, but in his deftly handled, inimitable way. Almost as jarring as their content, though, is that this is his twentieth collection of verse. Simic is prolific to the point of compulsion—constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing that terrible place I’ve come to love. I don’t believe I’m ever going to read that Simic poem I’ve been waiting for, the one in which a small girl, face and hands sticky with ice cream, reaches from her stroller to brush the narrator’s leg as her mother wheels her by. The narrator then finds himself in a small rural church where he says “despite it all, this life…this life…” and smiles to himself. Simic’s poems are too preoccupied with isolation and death to include moments in which the world redeems itself.

In Master of Disguises, we find the poems we expect, with titles like “Among the Exiles” and “Private Miseries.” They open with lines like “Grandma laughing on her deathbed” and “In his fear of solitude, he made us.” They end: “Then last night I thought of him / Sitting on a narrow bed / Breaking bread with his hands, / Unless, of course, he was dead.” Some critics say every poem is ultimately about death, and Simic’s relationship with death is complex. “Eyes Fastened With Pins” — from a previous collection, Charon’s Cosmology — was almost tender toward an overworked Death, suggesting a resignation on the author’s part. When Death lives a life of isolation, who are we to escape pain?

“Old Soldier” revisits this theme in the new book with more understatement by opening with the image of a child warrior:

By the time I was five,
I had fought in hundreds of battles,
Had killed thousands
And suffered many wounds
Only to rise and fight again.

The boy’s play-fighting is, of course, childlike, but it is perhaps, too, a reenactment of the trauma into which Simic himself was born: a world of bomb raids and “cinder-filled sky.” Yet, there is beauty in the boy’s world: cherry trees in bloom, for example. These moments do not find their way into the play-fighting of untraumatized children who don’t know the reality of war. In this poem, we meet a boy who does not imagine absolute ugliness; even in war, there are cherry trees. These moments speak to the child for whom violence and death are part of the natural landscape: alongside the cherry trees is a horse “hitched to a hearse, / Outside a pile of rubble, / Waiting with its head lowered / For them to finish loading the coffins.” Simic makes the unbearable bearable, often through understatement. In the hands of a lesser poet, a piece like “Old Soldier” might have become a clumsy piece of rhetoric. Simic reveals the story as a life lived, not as a life examined through politics.

This theme from “Old Soldier” reappears in the fifth section of the longer poem “The Invisible,” in which a blind man asks passersby to read the dice he casts:

He’d ask anyone
Whose steps he heard,
The mailman making his rounds,
The undertakers loading a coffin in their black wagon,
And you, too, mister,
Should you happen to come along.

Even the reader is made part of a narrative in which death wanders unknowingly, almost unnoticed, into the scene. Simic pushes further, though, embracing what seems to be a permeable membrane between this world and the other:

Don’t the shadows know something about it?
The way they, too, come and go
As if paying a visit to that other world
Where they do what they do
Before hurrying back to us.

There seems to be some inevitable reason for the movement between the two worlds. These shadows, busy with their unknowable tasks, recall the boy in “Old Soldier,” too immersed in plunging his sword into a swarm of flies to attend to the cat’s tail, which “needs pulling.” There is always purpose to the way we die in Simic’s poems. To his credit, he never offers an opinion as to what it might be. Simic gives a very abstract subject—the passage between terrestrial and spiritual life—solid footing through the image of the shadow. What, though, compels Simic to address this subject so frequently, and over such a wide span of decades?

Perhaps not enough has been made of the poet’s childhood in Yugoslavia during the second World War and its impact on him. Take Simic’s response to a question posed by Michael J. Vaughn:

I left Yugoslavia 54 years ago, have written about my childhood now and then, but rarely think about it any more. It wasn’t the culture that made an effect on me, but bombs falling on my head from 1941 to 1944, plus all the other nasty things that went on in occupied Belgrade.

The interviewer fails to follow up. Vaughn might have responded, “Others might argue that many of your poems seem to be about your childhood. Why do you disagree?” He might have asked Simic whether his childhood’s bombs found their way into poems he’s written about violence and “nasty things,” and why this is not, in fact, evidence of thinking about his childhood.

Perhaps Simic is loath to discuss those memories without the structure and control of poetry. It’s difficult to talk about something you have no control over, whether it’s the violence of the war-ravaged homeland or the inevitability of death. This is why the universe he has created throughout his career, this “terrible place,” seems so personal. This is why the reader can feel comfortable in the midst of great unease — because the author’s careful eye and voice is always present, never letting the angst grow unbearably great. Even though I’ve argued that his stories seem natural, they’ve clearly been painstakingly constructed. This is Simic’s great strength.

There are moments of weakness in this collection, too. “Scribbled in the Dark” is a series of fragmented images that begins with “A shout in the street” and ends with “Streams of blood in the gutter / Waiting for sunrise.” The nuance of his better poems is absent. The poem comes off as melodramatic, a list of images ripped from the pages of an overwrought neo-noir script.

Yet I’m willing to overlook the occasional misstep. To write even a single poem about pain or death in a way that both unsettles and eases the psyche is a feat of linguistic and emotional control. Master of Disguises builds on Simic’s legacy of style, which has refused to grow tiresome because his poems never claim to be a first telling. They are a retelling of some timeless unknowable truth into which we are all born.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

i mean i respect what’s going on but sometimes it’s like we get it your dad is dead and war is bad? idk ive read a single charles simic poem that moved me more than every one in this collection combined unfortunately

[Katie Garrity]

"Worriers Anonymous" "Old Man" "Wildflowers" "Dogs Pity Their Masters" "Sightseeing in the Capital" "Solitude" "The Empress"

[Tuli Márquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

brutal. Quina facilitat de treure tresors i imatges.

[Hope Whitby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Master of Disguises by Charles Simic
Published by Houghton /Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-0-547-39709-2
Master of Disguises is Simic’s first volume of poetry since he served as poet laureate of the United States in 2007-2008. Charles Simic is a literary artist. His poems paint images that walk a thin line between innocence and guilt, between what one struggles to remember and what he desperately wants to forget, and between what is truth and what is myth.
The opening poem, The Invisible One, tells of a child kept for years in a closet by his crazy parents on a street you walked often. In Nineteen Thirty-eight, a poem about the day Simic was born, we learn it was the year the Nazis marched into Vienna. And in Dead Season, you are transported to a landscape with somber skies that must have fallen in love with a story by Edgar Allan Poe.
Intrigued? I thought so. These 52 poems won’t disappoint.
This volume of poetry was purchased at an independent local bookseller, Chop Suey Books. 804-422-8066.
Hope Whitby

[Terresa Wellborn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simic: clear, frank, accessible poetry.

Beautiful stanzas, refreshing to read -- like a palate cleanser after a big meal. I appreciate his form & technique, but this subject matter doesn't thrill me (thus my reason for 3 stars and not 5).

[Jennifer (wildling_manor) · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always. Deserving of nothing less and often more.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is this book that reveals at least a great part of the potential of the author, and his wrestling with serious issues.  Even if the author does not come to necessarily the most godly conclusions, one can get the sense at least that he is aware of the stakes of his poetry and of the struggles for authenticity and honesty that writers face.  This book is not necessarily a pleasant one, for the author is too aware of the faults of the contemporary world and of the evils of history to blithely write.  At his best, the author has some worthwhile songs to say about deep matters [1], and even at its worst or most slight, this book offers a genuine look of an author really wrestling at the height of his powers with some deep questions about the ironies and absurdities of life and about the difficulty of maintaining faith when one is aware of what is going on in the world.  If the author does not have the same perspective I do, I can at least credit the author for the honesty of his struggle with the darkness both inside of him and outside in the world.

This book is divided into five parts, but the last two parts consist of one poem each.  The poem that makes up the fourth part, "The Invisible," is an attempt to grasp what cannot be seen, how successful it is a matter that must be left to the reader, but the fifth part views shows the poet thinking of himself as trying to speak for a God who he believes has never spoken to him.  While the poet is no doubt sincere in his belief, I believe him to be deeply mistaken.  God cries out in the silence as well as in speaking, and as He formed us and gave us our gifts and talents by which we seek insight about the world, He has spoken to the poet and to us all that is necessary for us to realize that we are condemned by our deeds.  The poet is at least wise enough to recognize this, as he presents a picture of nagging wives pointing out the mistakes of their husbands, and gives a skewering look at exiles seeking to keep the memory of a dead dictator alive even while remaining unrepentant about their own misdeeds that have led them to this point.

When the volume is taken as a whole, we can see this book as a sort of initial argument that would be successfully answered by a theodicy that makes sense of the materials in this poem, the injustices and wrongs of history, including Hitler's own murderous rise to power.  Too self-aware to deny the existence of evil within him or in the world as a whole, the author seeks to justify himself by using the tu quoque argument that attempts to defeat any argument of the author's evil by pointing out that there is no one with pure enough hands to judge him.  Yet on some level, he recognizes the need for "our salvation," and the fact that we must reach out to God even when we do not understand His ways and even when we feel that He needs to justify His ways to us.  If this book is not written by a person of faith, it is written by a person who has wrestled with faith and who is honest enough to recognize himself as a fallen being in need of redemption even if he does not trust in that redemption because he does not understand how it can take place or how the evils and wrongs of this world can be redeemed.  Such sincerity, even if mistaken, deserves to be appreciated on its own terms.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this collection of poetry fine, and I wished I had enjoyed it more, but I honestly didn't. But anyway, here's a sampling of pieces that resonated with me. Take "Solitude," for instance.

The only home you and I ever had.
No bigger than a matchbox--
Or else as vast as the sky full of stars--
With you as the sole tenant
Grateful for a flea bite to scratch
As you sit recalling the night
Someone knocked on your door.

You were afraid to open, but when you did,
There she was asking to borrow a candle.
You told her you didn't have one.
The two of you stood face to face
Between two dark apartments
Unable to think of anything else to say
Before turning your backs on each other.

What do you think of that one? Or take "Darkened Chessboard."

With the night already fallen,
It's hard to see who is playing,
Who is watching the game
At the little table in the park
Where no one says a word,
Engrossed as they are in the next move.

Their dinners are getting cold.
The wives they left behind
Are worrying themselves sick
While they dither there
On the lookout for the white queen
Last seen snatching a black pawn.

If they were all as good as these two poems, I'd have nothing to complain about.

[chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

They ate in restaurants with waiters older than themselves,
Musicians whose fingers bled
As they picked at their instruments
Making some tipsy widow burst into sobs
On hearing a tune her husband the general loved,
The one who sent thousands to their deaths.
-- "Among the Exiles"

It was such a sad story, it made everyone laugh.
-- "Nancy Jane"

In his fear of solitude, he made us.
Fearing eternity, he gave us time.
I hear his white cane thumping
Up and down the hall.
-- "Puppet Maker"

Our late friend hated blue skies,
Bible-quoting preachers,
Politicians kissing babies,
Women who are all sweetness.

He liked drunks in church,
Nudists playing volleyball,
Stray dogs making friends,
Birds singing of fair weather as they crap.
-- "Graveside Oration"

[Joe Stickley · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This is the first collection of Simic’s poetry I have read, and I can’t help feeling a little disappointed.

While Simic did capture the feel of small town America in some of his poems, overall I can help but feel underwhelmed.

Still, I am eager to read more of his work. He must be the American poet laureate for a reason, right?

Favourites poems were:

Blind man feeding pigeons
Same as ever
Graveside oration
Summer storm
The lovers
The invisible

[Jodi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I especially appreciated the characterization of war - the use of murder to improve the world.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's simply the best at what he does.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked the poem "Wildflowers".

[Abigail J · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wasn't my favorite of Simic's collections, but anything he writes is more than worth reading. I especially liked Graveside Oration and wildflowers.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

It seems always twilight in Simic's poems, or night, or somewhere in between. Even if the sun is rising, or it is noon, it seems the poet is watching from the shadows, or entering the shadows. And, there is always the presence of death, but a weightless death, that doesn't bear down too heavily; more often welcomed than feared. The person of the undertaker, the barber, the man on a corner, has no more weight or dignity than the pigeon, or the sparrow, the dog in the front yard. Things are small and specific; images intact and real and clearly seen, yet everything remains a mystery that won't be solved, not in the poet's or the reader's lifetime.

At a time where everything is over lit, Simic reveals how little is actually illuminated, and where everything is over orchestrated, he suggests the best we can manage is noise. Simic's little poems challenge both our utopian daydreams and dystopian nightmares. The past, present and future condition is simply loneliness. Nothing grander or more tragic: loneliness is the natural state of things and not psychological in origin. Which is to say it is not treatable. If I had to put down the two ideas that align most closely in these poems it is isolation and passivity. There are no heroes, no great acts required. There is no volition, because all paths converge.

It all comes down to objects. Objects isolated as insects pinned on a page, or object aligned as carefully as Victorian family portraits. Objects and beings share space, each with its role: if there is a door, someone will knock, if there are a pair of eyes, they will look into a stranger's window. If there is a sky, it exists to reveal a crow, and on a sidewalk a pigeon or sparrow.

I am struck by the modesty of the language, by its concision, abruptness and how the whole described is so much greater than the sum of its nouns, adjectives and verbs. Often, when I read a piece, I experienced an overwhelming sense of loss. It is, however, a curious loss. Like loneliness, Simic's conception of loss is simply an existential fact, which is to say, one did not even need to possess a thing in order to experience the loss of it. Loss is simply a constant. It is just another one of life's cruel jokes, like the poet leaving us with the image of lovers walking off holding hands.

I've come to read Simic as a deeply religious poet and even his most eccentric or dark pieces as psalms. He notices small things, passing phenomena; catches life in glances, so that nothing is insignificant, or exists without meaning. To look so closely is to see, to listen so intensely is to hear, and to note is to praise. The God of Simic's world may be capricious at best, a sadist at heart, but He is the Creator, and his works deserve our praise. Even when Simic is tempted to damn with faint praise, he praises nonetheless. In this way he is like a man who was hungry as a child and so remains hungry all his life, a man who, when he believes no one is watching, licks his plate clean.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simic explores the themes of war, loneliness, life, secret observation and blends them together with words that gently dig into the scene without disrupting it.

This collection contains several works that really grabbed me. Simic is a master at taking something empty and making it feel full though detailing the parts. He picks something that could be benign and then zeros in on the strange parts that only someone with binoculars would see. For example in Streets Paved with Gold he starts with bland suburban life and zooms in to focus on a man displaying some strange behavior.

My favorite work from this book is Graveside Oration. When I saw the title I though, oh great, another contemplative poem about death, as if there weren't enough of these. But I was wrong! And here it is:

Graveside Oration

Our late friend hated blue skies,
Bible-quoting preachers,
Politicians kissing babies,
Women who are all sweetness.

He liked drunks in church,
Nudists playing volleyball,
Stray dogs making friends,
Birds singing of fair weather as they crap.

Poems like this are gold to me. It shows fabulous observation, sarcasm, and humor. And it's short. That's no easy task. I wish all of Simic's poems in this book were this enjoyable. But, to me, they were not. Some of them felt too rambly. Even so, the book is truly worth taking a look at.

[Jeffrey (Akiva) Savett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like these poems, but I didn't love them. Simic has a darkness about him that I admire only because he exposes it honestly in surprising ways, like the line in "Puppet Maker" in which a daughter molesting father suddenly makes an appearance. Simic's poems are immediately recognizable as his: the almost constant political background noise, the dark wit, the frequently bizarre (and sometimes inexplicable) turn of phrase. It's just that I don't always like the poems. It's that plain and simple. I think Simic is frequently as interested in ideas as much as moments; I'm not. The best line in the book comes when Simic is describing the home of the local mailman who lost his son in a recent war, "canned laughter in the empty house/like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse."

Postscript...I've re-visited these poems a few days after finishing the book and they're resonating with me more now. The poems in Part III are really quite good and it was those I went back to over and over. I subsequently added a star as well.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked these poems. I found this the most accessible of the poems of Simic’s I’ve read. They were thoughtful excursions on daily life - the metaphors weaving a sometimes rambunctious, sometimes peaceful melody. The closing (long) piece “The Invisible” I liked particularly well - it caused me to see my world a little more clearly - which is what, good poetry, I think, always invites us to do. I’m glad I read it.

[Donald Armfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

A master of disguises shows more of Simic's poetic power. Saving the best for last in this collection "Invisible" What is always there, hiding around the corner, smiling down at you from the attic. You can't see it but can read what Simic has portrayed has invisible.

Favorites

*Master of Disguises
*Scenes of Old Life
*Driving Home
*In That Big House
*Streets Paved with Gold
*Darkened Chessboard
*Bright and Early
**The Invisible**

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ease of understanding what he's written. I think nearly all his pieces are good and fun.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always Simic makes great late-night reading. This collection particularly brought home the tragedy of war, more so than all the news reports I've read.

[Michelle Hoogterp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed every moment of it! I will definitely read more poetry from him.

[Jesse]

He liked drunks in church,
Nudists playing volleyball,
Stray dogs making friends,
Birds singing of fair weather as they crap.


from "Graveside Oration"