Product Description
This wide-ranging collection lives up to Nina Zivancevic's reputation as one of the foremost living poets of her native Yugoslavia. The culturally syncretistic nature of her experience and work addresses difficult issues and uncommon conditions. She offers a language and currency to negotiate the alienating chasm that has manifested itself in the postindustrial urban culture and that has resulted in the harboring of narrow, intolerant views. She brings to American poetry a European literary and linguistic sensibility that masks the fearlessness of her observations and assertions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Simic's best?
Charles Simic, Weather Forecast for Utopia and Vicinity (1983, Station Hill)

Charles Simic is a brilliant writer. Okay, enough said about that. Weather Forecast for Utopia and Vicinity is singular in his canon, and an essential book for Simic fans, because it is Simic in concentrated form; the pieces here are shorter than usual, more imagist, more surreal. In other words, Simic in "pure" form:

"The great Nietzsche supposedly
Once shaved a horse in Turin.

The same mad Nietzsche
Used to peek into his pocket-mirror,
From time to time,
To make sure he was still there.

It must have been the same mirror
He let the horse admire himself in
After the shave."
--"Grandmother Logic"

Full of the trademark wit and unexpected pleasures of all of Simic's works. Packs an extra punch thanks to brevity. Absolutely lovely. **** ½ ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Another wonderful Exact Change release.
Charles Simic, Nine Poems (Exact Change Press, 1989)

Despite the great disparity in the look of any given book by Exact Change, you can usually tell it's an Exact Change book. Few other micropresses are as consistent in the quality of their output, both from the standpoint of the work inside and the construction outside, as is Exact Change. Nine Poems is no exception, published as a huge orange chapbook, one poem to a page. And this is good Simic, right here; the nine poems involved are all reflections on childhood done in the inimitable Simic style that mixes traces of surrealism, dada, sentimentalism, wry humor, and various other things in small quantities to produce the gems that flow regularly from Mr. Simic's pen.

Long out of print now, I am sure. But well worth the search. **** ... Read more

Product Description
An anthology of poetry features the best work work of poets, many well known, many never before published. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Connection with the Unexpected
"What I like in poems is encountering the unexpected and I enjoy not knowing where I am or what comes next." ~ Charles Bernstein

Reading the entire "Best American Poetry" series would seem a fitting challenge for any poet or lover of poetry. Along the way I've felt various levels of involvement in the emotions presented as images flashed across the inner landscapes of my mind. In "The Best American Poetry 1992" I felt as if I was watching a movie as images came at me in their startling poetic beauty. I mostly felt stunned, in awe of the power of poetry to recreate moments with vivid inflection.

Guest editor Charles Simic presents a highly memorable introduction with images of members of an Amazon tribe, flute players and the sense that poets are in some way writing love letters to God. To be honest, I knew this book would be highly memorable when I held the book in my hands and noticed the artwork on the cover. This book speaks to you before you open the first page. You know that within these pages, mirrors will appear.

My thought while reading this book was mostly about why we long to read poetry. What drives this desire to read books of poetry? Is this our souls longing for a love letter from God or are we seeking some substance from the invisible worlds of thought where at times words describing reality can be more authentic than reality itself?

While reading these poems you may find yourself facing the shock of darkness, the glare of light and something between that is beautiful and shimmering. The desire to share experience, perhaps born of loneliness for words, is so evident.

"There were barred windows glaring at him
from the other side of the street
while the sun deepened into a smoky flare

that scalded the clouds gold-vermillion.
It was just an ordinary autumn twilight--
the kind he had witnessed often before--"
~Man on a Fire Escape

The poems Charles Simic chose for this anthology reveal well researched reflections, complex intricacies and startling beauty presented like a gourmet feast of words. Robert Bly reveals sadness in nature while bringing humor to a bird's tenacity. Daniel Halpern paints images of two cats and their similar desire for attention. Robert Morgan's "Honey" studies a beehive and seems to explore deeper emotional implications. Liam Rector presents a poem about Lighting Bugs that created in me scent memories of freshly cut grass and sweltering summer nights.

David St. John's poem almost left me blind, the way beautiful words all in a row leave me dizzy and intoxicated. Here, he takes us into a woman's "black telescope of the pupil," a mysterious world where he finds beauty and danger:

"Emerging Venus steps up along the scalloped lip
Of her shell, innocent and raw as fate, slowly
Obscured by a fluorescence that reveals her simple, deadly"

I love the end of the poem the most, where he refers back to a line earlier in the poem, tying the story together, a completion of thought that is rather satisfying.

Rachel Srubas writes of marriage and then later describes her feelings about poetry and love: "...in order to comment on the poem, I have to talk about love, which, I've learned, plunges us into our darkest histories and then brings us back up still breathing, with artifacts to show for ourselves."

What is intriguing about this book is the explanations of the inspiration behind the poems, so often missing in many anthologies, well, most of them. The Best American Poetry series gives us a window into which we can peer and what we see often teaches us about the truthfulness of poetry's expression.

"The Best American Poetry 1992" left me a little speechless with its overwhelming creative power. The power to transport you into a poet's world, imaginary or real. That power of connection that makes you feel as if you were there writing at your desk (like Lawrence Raab) when the monster appeared.

"Behind him: the dark scribbles of trees
in the orchard, where you walked alone
just an hour ago, after the storm had passed,
watching water drip from the gnarled branches,
stepping carefully over the sodden fruit.
At any moment he could put his fist
right through that window."
~The Sudden Appearance
of a Monster at a Window

~The Rebecca Review
... Read more

Product Description
This provocative, playful collaboration between Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Simic and noted illustrator Michels is a saucy Valentine’s treat.

Charles Simic, a leading light in the world of poetry, here turns his attention—and imagination!—to Eros. Sensual and skillfully wrought, Simic’s erotic poems are electrified by brilliantly graphic and lush illustrations by Howie Michels. Excerpts of this collaboration were featured in Tin House’s sold-out Sex issue, the magazine’s most popular ever. A perfect gift for a lover, this racy and delightful collaboration celebrates the vivid literary pleasure that occurs when words and images get in bed together. ... Read more

Product Description
The poems in Charles Simic's new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the morning to the fingerprints on a stranger's front door; from waiters in an empty restaurant to the decorations in a window of a funeral home; from a dog tied to a chain to a homeless man sleeping at the foot of a skyscraper; and other moments of solitude and clear vision.
"What is beautiful," he writes in one poem, "is found accidentally and not sought after. What is beautiful is easily lost." Simic is the metaphysician of the ordinary, a poet who reminds us of the mysteries of our daily lives.

... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Night Picnic - delightfully engaging!
I very much enjoyed Charles Simic's Night Picnic. I have yet to discover a volume of his poems, or essays for that matter, to which I would give less than 4 stars. Although I have given this volume 5 stars, if I could I would have given it 4 ½ stars. This is NOT a minor work, to be sure; however it is not, in my opinion one of Simic's best works. Still, I do highly recommend Night Picnic - the poetry is delightfully engaging and the hardbound volume itself is of a quality rarely found these days.

I do hope you will pick up this volume, but afterward may I suggest you go further and invest in Simic's absolutely mesmerizing volumes: A Wedding In Hell and The World Doesn't End - I have perhaps a dozen volumes of Simic's poetry in my collection and these two are by far my favorites yet. Of course Charles Simic famously was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The World Doesn't End, which you should know is primarily a work of prose poetry.

like a good cup of tea
I love this book but fail to find the right words to describe it. As Simic writes in metaphors I am making a clumpsy attempt to compare this collection to a cup of tea -- subtle aroma with awakening strength; simplicity in forms with depth in meanings. Sympathetic, elusive, hopeful, hopeless, provocative, and more. The writer left ample room for a reader's own perspective. The poems cover a broad range of subjects and the collection is stimulating from beginning to end. Here is just one example: "Light,/Mystic tipster,/You come rarely,/If at all//Down in the hole/To see me kneeling/With a clip-on halo/Waiting for you." The excerpt is telling of the effortlessness in rendition but the weight of thoughts. ... Read more

Product Description
The only definitive anthology of contemporary British poetry available in the United States,
New British Poetry presents the exciting work of thirty-five poets from England, Scotland, and Wales. In compiling this landmark anthology, T. S. Eliot Prize-winning Scottish poet Don Paterson and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic followed two rules: the poets chosen should be born after 1945 and should have at least two books published in Britain. The resulting anthology collects some of the very best work of a new generation of poets who have come of age since Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes.

From established poets such as Andrew Motion and James Fenton, to mid-career poets such as Glyn Maxwell and Kathleen Jamie, to recent T. S. Eliot Prize-winner Alice Oswald, the work is fiercely intelligent, often irreverent, and engaged with traditional forms and an exhilarating range of styles.

A generous sampling of each poet's work is included. As Paterson writes in his introduction, "this group of poets represents some of the most intelligent and imaginative writers
working in the English language today." New British Poetry is destined to become a seminal anthology, introducing many important new voices to American readers.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

the introduction is the best part
Unlike the reviewer above, I would argue the introduction is one of the best things about this book.Don Paterson's insightful analysis of the differences between the American and British poetry scenes is absolutely right on.The poetry is great, too!

worth getting
Most of us in America have little idea of what is going on in the British poetry scene. This anthology helps remedy that. Admittedly it only gives a partial sense of what is going on over there, but still, we get a good idea. And it is filled with some great poetry. Sure there is a few bad poems and some mediocre poems, but there is a lot of great poetry in this anthology. There are great poems by Michael Donaghy (though the editors missed a couple of Donaghy's best poems), James Fenton, Carol Ann Duffy, Glyn Maxwell, Andrew Motion, and Roddy Lumsden. And at least one really good poem by Ian Duhig, Christopher Reid, Anne Rouse, and Jo Shapcott.

BRILLIANT
I'm giving this brilliant anthology five stars, despite its infuriating introduction. The UK poetry scene is smaller than its US counterpart, so the "poetry wars" there must be like a knife fight in a phone booth. I can't understand why co-editor Don Paterson wants to fuel the conflict, as he himself admits that there are some "attractive voices" among the Post-modern camp. Wouldn't it have been more representative to include some of these, rather than the pedestrian Jacky Kay or the dull Andrew Motion?

However, the vast majority of the poets in this collection are anything but dull and pedestrian. There's an edgy postmodernity driving the work of John Ash, W.N. Herbert, Peter Didsbury and Jo Shapcott, for instance, and the more formal poets, like Peter Reading and Alice Oswald, are stunning technicians. There's surprisingly little of the "blokey" anti-intellectualism of Larkin and his heirs, though Larkin's masterfully elegiac tone and engagement with the colloquial are detectable in the work of Carol Ann Duffy and Sean O'Brien. I should add that Paterson's own poems are included. After grinding my teeth over his bad tempered factionalism I didn't want to like his poetry, but I found it stunning.

This book is required reading for American poetry readers as well as an exciting resource of imaginative possibilities for American poets. Just razor out a few pages of the introduction and stick in a few poems by Denise Riley. ... Read more

Product Description
Mattia Pascal endures a life of drudgery in a provincial town. Then, providentially, he discovers that he has been declared dead. He realizes he has a chance to start over, and he moves to a new city and adopts a new name, only to find this second life as insufferable as the old one. But when he returns to the world he knew, it's too late: his job is gone, and his wife has a new husband. Mattia Pascal's fate is to live on as the ghost of the man he was. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

The Ultimate Identity Crisis
A brilliant, tragi-comic existentialist examination! An enjoyable and thought-provoking commentary on the human condition, identity, art, and life, death and what lies in between.

Pirandello is literature.
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.

You can't escape from yourself
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!

Great Book!!!
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.

The brain is the piano and the player the soul
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." ... Read more

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Simic's finest hour?
Charles Simic, Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (Braziller, 1974)

It seems quite silly, in a time where poetry is such a neglected art, to say that an author "burst on the scene" pretty much at any time. But Return to a Place... was Simic's literary bursting, after a few chapbooks on small presses. This was the nation at large's first look at the man who, sixteen years later, would be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (for The World Doesn't End); even this far back in his career, it's easy to see why.

Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk is, as its title would suggest, a fountain of surrealist beauty. Simic, however, has more control with his work than most of the surrealists/dadas were able to achieve, lending his material a leaner, sparer power than one normally finds in surrealist work:

"Green Buddhas
on the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
and spit out the teeth."
("Watermelons")

All the slanted imagery, but with enough meaning close to the surface to be understandable. As well, the mix of humor and sorrow is a perfect translation of the feeling the surrealists strove to achieve and so often failed.

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Get yourself a copy of this. **** ½ ... Read more

Product Description
The astonishing distillations that make up the poetry of Vasko Popa combine elements of surrealism, folklore, and trenchant logic. This major figure in the postwar literature of Eastern Europe is here presented in a revised and expanded version of the volume that won the PEN Translation Prize in 1979. The present edition adds two new sequences, "Give Me Back My Rags" and "Heaven's Ring," as well as new sections of the famous series, "The Little Box." It offers a unique acquaintance with a wonderful poet. A book for surrealists, mythographers, postmodernists, scientists, and lovers of folklore and games.

The Serbian poet Vasko Popa is one of the most distinctive and original voices in contemporary European poetry. His translator, Charles Simic, has published many volumes of poems, translation, and essays. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize as well as a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, among numerous other awards. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Great translation of a work of wonder
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.

I have entered the realm of magical realism!
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 abeautiful and strange world of its own. Plus, there is a lot of magicalrealism in this book, which is something I always look for inliterature.

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

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

Product Description
Introduction by Charles SimicThe powerful and deeply moving work of the Serbian poet Aleksandar Ristovc, published for the first time in the United states.Make me a long coat of heavy cloth, tailor,the kind that won't fray,and of a dark color,so no one will notice the cigarette ashes.Make the dark trousers of the same material,to last as long as I want them to,wearing them to visit many cities, villages,and other out-of-the-way places.

* * * * *Make me a dark jacket, tailor, with wide, deep pocketsto clench my fists in, while watching the onethey're dragging from my table into the bushes,which begin to shake after a few moments.-from "Gingerbread Heart"Whether writing poems addressed to pigs and butchers, in the voices of prostitutes, or about rats and toilets, the Serbian poet Aleksandar Ristovc shows a vast, though never sentimental, sympathy for all that is despised, downtrodden, and disregarded in creation. Charles Simic's wonderfully authentic translations give us a major poet who spoke to and for his people with honesty and compassion.Aleksandar Ristovc died in 1994. Charles Simic is the author of many volumes of poetry, including The World Doesn't End, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He lives in New Hampshire. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Simic translations help unearth another gem.
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Summoning the Night
Gigantic ants with teeth of steel, a washerwoman howling in an alley of fire, a chicken talking to itself at the bottom of a well, a porcupine of needles arguing with a dead seamstress--these images are not in this book, but they might have been. Novica Tadic is the dealer at the blackjack table in Hell's raucous casino. He also runs the snack bar outside and will smoke a cigarette with you in the alley until you discover he's not real. Still, his voice lingers... Charles Simic translated these poems into English. Fans of Simic's poetry will enjoy these dark psalms infused with black humor and absurdist truths. Half price for the cyclops... ... Read more

Product Description
Word count: 4054. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on November 1, 2008. The length of the article is 549 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Charles Simic. That Little Something.(Book review)
Author: Rita Signorelli-Pappas
Publication: World Literature Today (Magazine/Journal)
Date: November 1, 2008
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 82Issue: 6Page: 73(1)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on January 1, 2005. The length of the article is 316 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Charles Simic. The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
Author: Fred Dings
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2005
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 79Issue: 1Page: 90(1)

Article Type: Book Review, Brief Article

Distributed by Thompson Gale ... Read more