Sixty poems

Here are sixty of Charles Simic's best-loved poems, collected to celebrate his appointment as the fifteenth poet laureate of the United States. 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, a sardonic humor all his own. Gathering much of his material from the seemingly mundane minutia of 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. "Few poets have been as influential--or as inimitable--as Charles Simic." --The New York Times Book Review "It takes just one glimpse of Charles Simic's work to establish that he is a master, ruler of his own eccentric kingdom of jittery syntax and signature insight." --Los Angeles Times Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, and immigrated with his parents to the United States in 1954, at the age of sixteen. Recently retired from the University of New Hampshire, where he taught American literature and creative writing, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 and held a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant from 1984 to 1989. He is the winner of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.