Charles Simic, a much honored poet, died earlier this month at the age of 85, and in keeping with my practice of honoring recently departed authors I found this volume at the Cambridge Public Library and read it.

Simic was born and lived the first 16 years of his life in Belgrade, Yugoslavia experiencing WWII and the Iron Curtain in a direct and personal way.  When his family emigrated to the US, they settled in Oak Park, Illinois and Simic graduated from my old high school.  A MacArthur genius grant recipient, he has won the Pulitzer and the Wallace Stevens Prize among other awards, and was the US Poet Laureate in 2007.

His poetry is darker than most of the work that I enjoy and a bit more surreal as well.  Anger (clenched fists), despair (black cats, dogs, yarn, dresses, clothes), and time (clocks, watches, eternities without time) characterize his poems as do leafless trees and disappearances and disguises.

Two poems which I thought were exceptional were ‘Dead Reckoning’ and ‘Metaphysics Anonymous’.  The former’s second stanza reads: “The more he reflected on things,/The more he felt sure/Of nothing, except/His being here,/Holding on for dear life/To a few eccentricities.. Like his inability to sleep at night./A lifelong rebellion/Against the monster Eternity./A desire now and then/To raise his head from the pillow/And spit in its eye in the dark.”

Metaphysics Anonymous reads: “A storefront mission in a slum/Where we come together at night/To confess our lifelong addiction/To truth beyond appearances,/Of which there are clues everywhere.//Or so we tell ourselves./Estranged from family and friends,/Busy tuning pianos on Saturn,/Looking for a moonbeam in a cucumber,/If you were to ask us.//The unreality of us being here,/An additional quandary we are cautioned/Not to bother our heads with/As we wait with eyes lowered/For coffee and cookies to be served.”

This is not light or easy fare but powerful and moving as this child of war-torn Europe struggles with memory and man’s inhumanity to man.