ABSTRACT
Simic observes in the introduction to his anthology of Serbian poetry (The Horse Has Six Legs, 1992). As easily as one could apply this dictum to any number of contemporary American poets, it seems an especially apt description of Simic's own work, which combines haunting, suggestive images with an often surprising economy of language. His work bears the ready mark of French Surrealism as well as Yugoslav folklore and poetry, of which he is an avid and prolific translator. Cunning in their execution and unapologetic for their faith in conceit, Simic's poems trace the delicate boundary between experience and fancy, which Simic treats as equally tenuous mediations between the world and consciousness. Accordingly, his work is often characterized as dark, dream-like, or macabre, although such formulations fail to convey the humor and sophistication with which he addresses topics of universal significance, from the perception of objects (in poems like "Knife" and "Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand") and the failure of utterance ("errata") in his early work to the prose meditations on personal and national histories in The World Doesn't End, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.
