Simic puts chirping birds, sex, and happiness into a world of broken windows, shivering trees, soldiers, lone dogs, the homeless of the city, and a God still making up his mind. Provocative...a tantalizing, beautiful fusion of visions (Bloomsbury Review).
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Hamlet s ghost wandering the halls of a Vegas motel, a street corner ventriloquist using passersby as dummies, and Jesus panhandling in a weed-infested Eden are just a few of the startling conceits Simic unleashes in this collection. Few contemporary poets have been as influential-or inimitable-as Charles Simic (New York Times Book Review).
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In this new collection of sixty-two poems Charles Simic paints exquisite and shattering word pictures that lend meaning to a chaotic world populated by insects, bridal veils, pallbearers, TV sets, parrots, and a finely detailed dragonfly. Suffused with hope yet unafraid to mock his own credulity, Simic's searing metaphors unite the solemn with the absurd. His raindrops listen to each other fall and collect memories; his wildflowers are drunk with kissing the red-hot breezes; and his God is a Mr. Know-it-all, a wheeler-dealer, a wire-puller. In this latest lyrical gathering, Simic continues to...

Selected from the vast range of his work, the writings included in this anthology trace Gunter Grass's development as a writer, and with it the history of a nation coming to terms with its past.
Excerpts from Grass's major novels-from The Tin Drum to Crabwalk-are included, as are numerous short fictions, essays, and poems, many of which have never appeared before in English. Grass's gifts as an observer of and participant in the social and political landscape are justly celebrated, as are his inimitable sense of humor, his consistent defense of the disadvantaged, and his mastery of the...

Charles Simic has been widely celebrated for his brilliant poetic imagery; his social, political, and moral alertness; his uncanny ability to make the ordinary extraordinary; and not least, the sardonic humor all his own. Gathering much of his material from the seemingly mundane minutiae of contemporary American culture, Simic matches meditations on spiritual concerns and the weight of history with a nimble wit, shifting effortlessly to moments of clear vision and intense poetic revelation.
Chosen as one of the New York Library's 25 Books to Remember for 2003, The Voice at 3:00 A....

In this collection, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Charles Simic puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them.

Lyrical poetry that sings of farmers, families and nunneries in Belgium and Flanders.

Whether he draws for inspiration on American blues, Serbian folktales, or Greek myths, Simic's words have a way of their own. Each of these forty-four poems is a powerful mixture of concrete images. Each records the reality and myth of the world around us-and in us. "Short, perfectly shaped, Simic's poems float past like feathers, turning one way, then another" (Village Voice).

In this volume, Simic fills the wee hours of his poetry with angels and pigs, riddles and cemeteries. His is a rich, haunted world of East European memory and american present-a world of his own creation, one always full of luminous surprise. Simic writes so simply that his words fall like drops of water, but they ripple outward to evoke an ominous and numinous world (Washington Post Book World).
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