The World Doesn't End: A Poetry Collection

by Charles Simic

Overview

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

“One of the truly imaginative writers of our time.” —Los Angles Times Book Review

You never know what Charles Simic is up to until you reach the end of the line or the bottom of the paragraph. Waiting for you might be a kiss. Or a bludgeon. A smile at the absurdities of society, or a wistful, grim memory of World War II.

He puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity.

Charles Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets us see through them. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156983501
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/14/1989
Series:	Harvest Book
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	389,344
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

Editorial Reviews

These 67 prose poems could be from Hamlet's writing tablet: investigating madness, they search for truth. Poet, translator, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship, Simic tries to make sense of a world that like ``the old river . . . in its confusion sometimes forgets and flows backwards.'' Ancestors undergo mysterious ``dark and evil days'' (a man exchanges clothes with a dog, heaven is full of ``little shrunken deaf ears instead of stars'') that test their sanity. From the best of these sophisticated fables of trial by ordeal, wry intensity flashes. On ``the verge of understanding,'' ``in a forest of question marks,'' Simic's work, mingling Rimbaud and Socrates, startles us into meditation.-- Frank Allen, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.

Library Journal