Jackstraws : poems
/ Charles Simic.
- New York : Harcourt Brace , c1999.
- ix, 85 p. ; 22 cm.
With James Tate, Mark Strand, and others, Simic led American poetry's turn toward surrealism in the late 1960s, establishing an eerily disjunctive but imagistically arresting style. Today the Yugoslavia-born poet and 1989 Pulitzer Prize winner continues resolutely along the same antilogical, irreverent path, but that path is now deeply worn, and surprise is less easily evoked. While Simic sets up unpredictable scenes that blend the comic with the ominous ("A pastry chef carrying a lit birthday cake/ Found himself in the blinding snowstorm"), he also falls prey to an awkwardness of phrasing that can read like an unsteady translation ("The smoke that was like the skirts/ Slit on the side to give the legs freedom/ To move while dancing the tango/ Past ballroom mirrors on page 1944"). Some endings seem tacked on or settled for, as if the poet had lost interest in the dream. Like any dream journal, Jackstraws is a mixture of hits and misses, not without invention but unlikely to add substantially to Simic's established reputation.