The Lunatic
Poems
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
From Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate Charles Simic comes a dazzling collection of poems as original, meditative, and humorous as the legendary poet himself.
This latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic, one of America’s most celebrated poets, demonstrates his revered signature style—a mix of understated brilliance, wry melancholy, and sardonic wit. These seventy luminous poems range in subject from mortality to personal ads, from the simple wonders of nature to his childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia.
For over fifty years, Simic has delighted readers with his innovative form, quiet humor, and his rare ability to limn our interior life and concisely capture the depth of human emotion. These stunning, succinct poems—most no longer than a page, some no longer than a paragraph—validate and reinforce Simic’s importance and relevance in modern poetry.
This collection showcases the signature elements of a master poet:
Pulitzer Prize Winning Poetry: From a former U.S. Poet Laureate, experience the concise, powerful verse that has defined a generation of American literature.Surreal & Meditative: Encounter poems that blur the line between dream and reality, finding deep meaning in everyday objects from lost buttons to dead telephones.Wry & Sardonic Wit: Explore a unique worldview where profound observations on mortality are delivered with a sly, knowing humor.A Singular Voice: Journey from the streets of war-torn Yugoslavia to contemporary America in poems that are as deeply personal as they are universal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The prolific Simic (New and Selected Poems: 1962 2012), former U.S. Poet Laureate and 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner, graces readers with 70 grimly playful poems that confirm his position among the literary elite. The collection primarily revolves around nostalgia, aging, and unappreciated everyday wonders. Unvarnished yet profound, these poems show a boundless sensitivity underneath their impish presentation: "a ray of sunlight/ In the silence of the afternoon,/ ... found a long lost button/ Under some chair in the corner,// A teeny black one that belonged/ On the back of her black dress." He addresses the past in his poems with judicious sentimentality and ambivalence, cautioning readers against becoming prisoners of memory: "Everything outside this moment is a lie." While some poems dwell on the loneliness of old age ("That one remaining, barely moving leaf/ The wind couldn't get to fall/ All winter long from a bare tree / That's me!"), Simic battles this loneliness in the company of "Imagination, devil's old helper," who helps him breathe life into the inanimate and greater significance into the animate as he contemplates the ruminations of cows, admires the menace of fleas, and comments on the foreboding quality of black cats. Simic's new collection is an outlandish and masterly mixture of morbidity and heartfelt yearning.
