Selected Poems, 1963-2003

Serbian by birth, brought up under Nazi occupation and transplanted to America in his teens, Charles Simic has had the opportunity to distill a highly particular vision of the world, in which comic gaiety goes hand in hand with the recognition of our darker spiritual and philosophical problems. Blending the real and the surreal, the urbane and the uncanny, Simic's poems construct a neighbourhood of experience that is estranged yet recognisably at home with its surroundings. He notes what the eye sees and what the subsconscious has to say on the matter, in a poetry which is a triumph of the plain style.This selection, made by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author himself from forty years of writing, is an outstanding overview of one of the wisest American poets.'Simic's writing comes dancing out on the balls of its feet, colloquially fit as a fiddle, a sparring partner for the world.' Seamus Heaney