A new collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, who roots his poetry in the ordinary world while still taking in the wide sweep of the human experience.
Reflective and melancholic, with references to people leaving and lights flashing in the distance, the poems evoke a sense of loss—either present or impending ... For all libraries.
Simic presents another striking poetry collection meticulously centered on his signature themes of nature, observations of ordinary events, and the leveling emotions related to death ... Simic makes sacred the language of deep realizations by declining to use exaggerated embellishment.
Simic has mastered a deceptively simple and straightforward lyric style that has served him well over two dozen books of poetry. His latest is no different in this regard ... These poems are often slyly funny, emotionally generous, and wrapped up in the lives of the people they depict ... Some of the new poems, such as The American Dream, arrive as premade classics, evoking times past in a stilted, twilit present and reminding readers of Simic’s keen eye for the restless, the absurd, and the enduringly human.
