Charles Simic

One of the leading American poets offers a new collection of poems that plumbs the ordinary American experience for spiritual insights, wit, and historical relevance. Reprint.

A diverse collection of Simic's poetry.

A collection of new and selected essays by the Pulitzer Prize–winner and former Poet Laureate. In addition to being one of America's most famous and commended poets, Charles Simic is a prolific and talented essayist. The Life of Images brings together his best prose work written over twenty-five years. A blend of the straightforward, the wry, and the hopeful, the essays in The Life of Images explore subjects ranging from literary criticism to philosophy,...

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;...

"My Noiseless Entourage is haunted by marooned, wordless individuals, but also by a sense of indecipherable, constant chatter, the murmuring on the other side of the wall. Charles Simic illuminates the slow, distracted quality of rural life, and the paranoia, the suspicions of city-dwellers. An old man sitting in his backyard with a rope in his hand. A flock of spooked starlings that seem to have heard something no one else has. The lodger no one...