Come Closer and Listen
New Poems
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
An insightful and haunting new collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic
Irreverent and sly, observant and keenly imagined, Come Closer and Listen is the latest work from one of our most beloved poets. With his trademark sense of humor, open-hearted empathy, and perceptive vision, Charles Simic roots his poetry in the ordinary world while still taking in the wide sweep of the human experience.
From poems pithy, wry, and cutting—“Time—that murderer/that no has caught yet”—to his layered reflections on everything from love to grief to the wonders of nature, from the story of St. Sebastian to that of a couple weeding side by side, Simic’s work continues to reveal to us an unmistakable voice in modern poetry. An innovator in form and a chronicler of both our interior lives and the people we are in the world, Simic remains one of our most important and lasting voices on the page.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer-winner Simic (The Lunatic) has mastered a deceptively simple and straightforward lyric style that has served him well over two dozen books of poetry. His latest is no different in this regard, noting (and plucking) "the cunning threads/ By which our lives are rigged." Simic's world is a quiet one, though its quietness is haunted with echoes of wars, scams, loves had and lost, and a wry smile that seems to know the score no matter how dark the world gets. "They say Death/ Hid his face in his hood/ So he could smile too," Simic writes, "I like the black keys better/ I like the lights turned down low/ I like women who drink alone/ While I hunch over the piano/ Looking for all the pretty notes." These poems are often slyly funny, emotionally generous, and wrapped up in the lives of the people they depict children at play, men and women in private moments, mythical figures and deities outside their myths. Some of the new poems, such as "The American Dream," arrive as premade classics, evoking times past in a stilted, twilit present and reminding readers of Simic's keen eye for the restless, the absurd, and the enduringly human.
