Books : Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems
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by: Charles Simic
List Price: $22.00Amazon.com's Price: $17.60 You Save: $4.40 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780807614563
ISBN: 0807614564
Label: George Braziller
Manufacturer: George Braziller
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 255
Publication Date: November 01, 1999
Publisher: George Braziller
Sales Rank: 155190
Studio: George Braziller
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
When this selection of Charles Simic's 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 bird's foot / Worn around the cannibal's neck' and a bird's chirp is 'Like a match flickering / In a new grave.' Life's 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 Simic's work, these poems occupy an established place in American poetry.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Great poems, collection a bit lacking
This book is all right if you're just discovering Simic, but if you're adding it to a collection it's not an essential buy. Despite the dust jacket's promise it doesn't deliver in the way of new or revised material, and the choice of poems mirrors too much the older (and cheaper) compilation, Selected Poems. Most of Simic's books are available and very affordable in paperback, and once you get to know him, you'll want them all. The "greatest hits" package here is optional.
Rating:  - An essential volume of poems
Anyone who is interested in the breadth, playfulness and imagistic intensity of contemporary American poetry needs to buy this book. Simic's early poems--surreal and yet rooted many times in the commonalities of life--are sparse yet full of surprises. These poems, when I was an undergrad, changed the way I THOUGHT about poetry, what it could accomplish. Nearly devoid of literary pretentions, Simic's poetry is nonetheless artful, using slang, riddles and the like to construct his worlds-within ... Read More
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