Faber £12.99 pp176
Charles Simic’s Selected Poems draws on 14 collections published since 1971, a large body of work in which he has created a world and an idiom that are instantly recognisable and widely imitated. Born in Belgrade in 1938, he has lived in America since 1954, and has thus experienced the three main political tendencies of the 20th century: fascism, communism and capitalism.
It is striking that his poems make no clear distinctions among these competing powers. The times are always evil; the signs ominous; the solid world threatens to dissolve at the drop of a hat: “Everything is teetering on the edge of everything / with a polite smile.” Where poets of exile denounced tyranny, Simic’s poems reveal little immediate appetite for scale or the big picture. The tendency of his work is to suggest that no such view is available by normal means. His is the response from under the floorboards, or from the neglected roadside: “Go inside a stone / that would be my way.” This policy of non-alignment may account for his popularity in the west, where many poets find themselves in the same boat, but not in the same danger.
Where Zbigniew Herbert, one of the great poets of modern Poland, saw the task of the poet as upholding and embodying in his work an idea of civilisation in the face of competing darknesses, Simic is in many ways a comic writer, to whom the role of public prophet would seem impertinent. The comedy, of course, is inky: Gallows Etiquette speaks of the grandmothers who used to knit under the scaffold. If they dropped a ball of yarn, “One pictures the hooded executioner / and his pasty-faced victim / Interrupting their grim business / To come quickly to their aid.”
Like many poets from the former eastern bloc, Simic makes use of fable and legend and their cousin surrealism, but while these are commonly ways of dealing with material that might have fallen foul of the censors, his world becomes an end in itself. In the weaker poems, the effect is wishful and mechanical, but there are many moments of startling illumination, and these are made more powerful by the seeming plainness and directness of Simic’s manner. Windy Night promises the end of the world: “There’ll be nothing but infinite space. / The silence supreme. Almighty silence. / Egyptian sky. Stars like torches / Of grave robbers, entering the tombs of kings.” As though casually, Simic reverses the usual sense of dissolution in order to read it as a further entombment by history.
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There is no escape, except briefly into the body’s pleasure. “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.” More often, a humble domestic setting provides evidence for unease; at times, at the simple turn of a line, there is a sudden widening of perspective from bedroom, to world, to the span of history, to the indifferent grandeur of time itself: “Just thinking about it, I forgot to wind the clock. / We woke up in the dark. / How quiet the city is, I said. / Like the clocks of the dead, my wife replied. / Grandmother on the wall, / I heard the snows of your childhood / Begin to fall.”
Perhaps what makes Simic particularly interesting is that he has successfully carried over into American English a central European sense of life, rurally based, in some ways little changed since the 19th century, and done so without a tremor of quaintness. Rural New England reminds him of home; at the same time, home has vanished. It is not that Simic’s folk-tale world of superstition, paranoia, word of mouth and violent disruption is suddenly “relevant” (accursed cant word of the unthinking), but that a western readership is recognising that his way of seeing is not so foreign after all.
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