Scribbled in the Dark
Poems
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- $30.99
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning former poet laureate, a collection of elegiac, irreverent new poems—an American master at the height of his talent
The latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic hums with the liveliness of the writer’s pen. Scribbled in the Dark brings the poet’s signature sardonic sense of humor, piercing social insight, and haunting lyricism to diverse and richly imagined landscapes. Peopled by policemen, presidents, kids in Halloween masks, a fortune-teller, a fly on the wall of the poet’s kitchen; set on crowded New York streets, on park benches, and under darkened skies; the pages within toy with the end of the world and its infinity. Simic continues to be an imitable voice in modern American poetry and one of its finest chroniclers of the human condition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his latest exemplary collection, Simic (The Lunatic), one of American poetry's most revered and acclaimed figures, reveals a mysterious world that is simultaneously sinister and whimsical, observable through the minute details trailing in the wake of life's most fleeting moments: "For a mind full of disquiet/ A trembling roadside weed is Cassandra,/ And so is the sight/ Of a boarded up public library." The book's references to mortality, the undertaker, and the graveyard could easily mark these as typical late poems, but Simic has always had a knack for channeling the morbid and managing to blend it with the joyous. It is in navigating those kinds of opposing emotions that he is at his most clever and profound: "I came here in my youth./ A wind toy on a string./ Saw a street in hell and one in paradise." Something similar could be said of how he handles isolation and the theatricality of the mundane: "The woman I love is a saint/ Who deserves to have/ People falling on their knees," he writes, "Instead, here she is on the floor/ Hitting a mouse with a shoe/ As tears run down her face." Image by image, Simic composes miniature masterpieces, offering what appears as a seemingly effortless study in language's cinematic possibilities.
