A Wedding in Hell

October 31, 1994
The world according to Simic (Hotel Insomnia) has never been an especially nice place, and his new collection of poems registers no signs of improvement. Urban decay, war and the depravities of false priests and corrupt rulers provide the occasions for much of this work, where private desperation is seen to be our lot and any respite momentary, at best. The knack of Simic's poetry is to have found a voice to reflect on such matters without sounding solemn or maudlin-a plainspoken, slightly wary voice that wins our confidence by its apparent modesty and our gratitude by its power to surprise, accommodating cynicism and injured outcries. Still, nothing that Simic says, however humanly concerned, is without the salt of irony, sometimes heavily applied. Even his approach to poetic form has become ironic: surrealist images, used to startling effect in his early books, are now more commonly deployed as near cliches, persuading us there's nothing new under the sun; individual poems have a self-consciously throwaway quality, as if to advise us that they are no better than anything else. And yet Simic's poetry comforts and (ironically) charms us, too, even as it insists that it is only ``like the wind/ Between the cold winter stars./ A creaky door/ Way out in the darkness./ Some kind of small bird/ Trapped by a cat/ And calling on heaven to witness.''

October 15, 1994
Simic is a poet of quiet angst and profound skepticism. His poems reflect this in their brevity and spareness. In his newest collection, he seems to be working with a set number of images and words he uses like puzzle pieces to create a series of desolate and enigmatic poems. Some of these recurring images include a stopped clock, a dark window, a cockroach, a TV with the sound off tuned to a sex scene, and Christ in pain. Simic's blasted world lies stunned beneath the "mad serenity" of the sky. People are destitute or, at best, uneasy, occupied with empty rituals of watchfulness undermined by apathy. These are tense and biting poems of resignation, fragmented dreams, and melancholia. Some are prayers to a muddled God half afraid of his own creations, while others reveal a bleak humor in the perversity of things, in death shadowing every glimmer of life. These poems are hard-edged and unsettling, but as you acclimate yourself to Simic's grim outlook, images of startling intensity and intelligence leap from the page like heat lightning on an oppressive night, and you nod in respectful recognition. ((Reviewed October 15, 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)