Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation

Smelling of mice nests

This article is more than 19 years old
Charles Simic's poems evoke bleak and chilling landscapes, says Ian Sansom. But his wit and technique are profoundly appealing

Selected Poems 1963-2003
by Charles Simic
176pp, Faber, £12.99

Charles Simic writes poetry as if he's talking straight at you, beer in one hand, Heidegger in the other, and as if he's alive, thank goodness, but he knows he's going to die, alas. In comparison with the usual mystic mumblings, he sounds like he's got hold of a bullhorn and he's out on the street-corner hollering: "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, people, but we're all doomed." There is no-one more cheerful than a man with a well-developed sense of his own mortality.

Simic was born in Belgrade in 1938 - "My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin," he likes to joke in interviews; "Germans and the Allies took turns dropping bombs on my head while I played with my collection of lead soldiers on the floor." He now teaches English at the University of New Hampshire and is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, works of translation (notably Vasko Popa), essays and memoirs. Faber's new Selected Poems - there have been others - contains poems from 14 of his collections, and as soon as you've read it you're going to want to get hold of a copy of The World Doesn't End (1990), Simic's collection of prose-poems (not included here), and his book about the artist Joseph Cornell, Dime-Store Alchemy (1992), and his memoir A Fly in the Soup (2000).

The first poem included in the Selected is from his collection Dismantling the Silence (1971):

   "Sometimes walking late at night
   I stop before a closed butcher shop.
   There is a single light in the store
   Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel."

("Butcher Shop")

A little under 10 years later, "Empire of Dreams", from Classic Ballroom Dances (1980), begins: "On the first page of my dreambook / It's always evening / In an occupied country. / Hour before the curfew. / A small provincial city. / The houses all dark. / The storefronts gutted."

Then in A Wedding in Hell (1994) he writes of "Monumental, millennial decrepitude, / As tragedy requires. A broad / Avenue with trash unswept, / A few solitary speck-sized figures / Going about their business / In a world already smudged by a schoolboy's eraser" ("Dream Avenue").

Simic is not, clearly, a poet you turn to for vast variations in the literal or metaphorical landscape: he has a certain view of the way the world is, and each of his books illustrates this view, whether it be some versified tale of a rat being bludgeoned to death at a school nativity play ("Note"); a vision of a madwoman marking Xs with a piece of chalk "On the backs of unsuspecting / Hand-holding, homebound couples" ("Early Evening Algebra"); or the "Millions of empty rooms with TV sets turned on" in "Hotel Starry Sky". His work reads like one big poem or project, a vast Simic-scape of "eternal November" ("Classic Ballroom Dances"), where "It looks so dark the end of the world may be near" ("Blood Orange"), with "The weight of tragic events / On everyone's back" ("Toward Nightfall"), and where "a day doesn't go by without me / Sticking a loaded revolver inside my mouth" ("Mummy's Curse").

You might argue - and people have - that this makes his work somehow crude, depressing and small, the poetic equivalent of a simple Saxon church, lacking in the majesty and scope, the range and rhythm available to the true poets and master builders (Simic works in a pretty plain diction, usually in tetrameters or pentameter, in stanzas of four, five or six lines, and most of the poems take up no more than a page). But you'd be wrong: Simic's typically central European worldview is saved by his typically central European sense of humour, and his central European surrealism. And of course mastery of technique means the disappearance of technique: he works so hard he makes simplicity look easy.

Simic was known in the 1970s for his object poems - "Fork", "Brooms", "Needle", and so on, several of which are included here - and in them you can see him working out his aesthetic. In these poems inanimate stuff comes alive through outlandish metaphor and simile, and with the consequent merging and confusion of categories, everything becomes as though a character in a Greek tragedy, or a tragi-comedy: blind, foolish, menacing and deeply corrupted. "Fork" famously imagines a fork as "a bird's foot / Worn around the cannibal's neck". "My Shoes" become the "secret face of my inner life: / Two gaping toothless mouths, / Two partly decomposed animal skins / Smelling of mice nests".

Suddenly, from a limited focus on everyday objects and places, people and events - the fork, the shoes, the grocery shop, the weary evening meal - the whole world becomes thrillingly alive with threats and possibilities. The butcher's shop on a dark night becomes an image of history, the apron with blood "smeared into a map", knives "like altars". In "Solitude", when crumbs fall from the table, "somewhere already / The ants are ... setting out to visit you". The body becomes a bestiary (in "Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand"), and consumption itself becomes an act of violence:

   "Green Buddhas
   On the fruit stand.
   We eat the smile
   And spit out the teeth."

("Watermelons")

Simic's own switchblade smile is so beguiling that it reminds one of James Agate writing of Marlene Dietrich, "I can only say that she makes reason totter on her throne."

Two other appealing aspects of his work - in a work full of the profoundest appeal - should be mentioned, for those still wavering, worried about spending their time, or their £12.99, on so much astonishing bleakness. First, there is the large and significant element of folktale and riddling that runs throughout the poems, and the wide range of amusing logic problems that Simic sets out to solve, such as "The enormous engineering problems / You'll encounter by attempting to crucify yourself" ("Popular Mechanics"). Admittedly riddles are hardly a consolation, if that's what you're looking for: "Hangs by a thread - / Whatever it is. Stripped naked. / Shivering. Human. Mortal. / On a thread finer than starlight" ("Two Riddles").

So, finally, you may be interested to know that what little comfort there is in Simic's poetry comes in the form of good food and good wine and warm bodies, which draw from his lips a simple hallelujah:

   "No sooner have we made love
   Than we are back in the kitchen.
   While I chop the hot peppers,
   She wiggles her ass
   And stirs the shrimp on the stove.
   ...
   "I'm getting fat," she says,
   Turning this way and that way
   Before the mirror.
   "I'm crazy about her shrimp!"
   I shout to the gods above."

("Crazy about Her Shrimp").

· Ian Sansom's novel Ring Road is published by Harper Perennial

Explore more on these topics

Most viewed

Most viewed