Selected Early Poems

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.