This book offers new perspectives on the work of this original and hard-to-categorize American poet, recently named Poet Laureate of the United States.Charles Simic, the fifteenth 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.This 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.