Charles Simic, recently named Poet Laureate of the United States, is one of America's most popular---and enigmatic---contemporary poets. Set apart from his contemporaries by a particularly inclusive and worldly vision, his is a poetic voice singular in our time for its quality of empathy, for its imagination-enriched logic, and for its deep and abiding clarity. In Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry the perspectives of a range of critics, poets, and scholars (including James Atlas, William Matthews, Liam Rector, Helen Vendler and Diane Wakoski, among others) are brought together in an attempt to offer an appraisal of his art.

The book traces the critical reception to Simic’s poetry, beginning with the earliest responses, and reveals a constantly changing image of the relationship between the poet and his work. Essays and book reviews from sometimes radically different points of view address the body of Simic’s verse and attempt to delineate the aesthetic from which his art emerges. Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry concludes with an extended interview and a selection of Simic’s autobiographical writings.

Books by Charles Simic available from the University of Michigan Press:



Memory Piano
The Metaphysician in the Dark
A Fly in the Soup: Memoirs
Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs
The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs
Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: Essays on Poetry and a Memoir
The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry

Bruce Weigl is author of thirteen collections of poetry, most recently Declension in the Village of Chung Luong, editor of three collections of critical essays, and translator of three books of poetry from the Vietnamese and two from the Romanian. In 2006 he was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.

A volume in the Under Discussion series.