Walking the Black Cat

by Charles Simic

Overview

In his thirteenth collection, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic melds folklore and black magic with everyday life.

Hamlet’s ghost wandering the halls of a Vegas motel, a street corner ventriloquist using passersby as dummies, and Jesus panhandling in a weed-infested Eden are just a few of the startling conceits Simic unleashes in this collection. 

“Few contemporary poets have been as influential-or inimitable-as Charles Simic."—The New York Times Book Review

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780156004817
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/17/1996
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

Editorial Reviews

Arguably the most original of our great poets, Simic has been recognized with a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize. The apparent simplicity of his poetic voice evokes a world at once darkly foreign yet seductively familiar. This collection, like Simic's many previous volumes, dazzles with images, insights, and narratives and disturbs with its recognition of the dark and inexplicable. Simic's familiar themes appearscraps of an austere childhood in war-ravaged Europe, fascination with silence and anonymity, terrors and alienations of the commonplace, and conversations with philosophers and poets who feed his imagination. Interestingly, love poems rise to the top and give this book its rapture. Despite this thrust, a few dark corners remain. Still, it would be a shame not to persist; with Simic the effort is always rewarded. Highly recommended for anyone interested in contemporary poetry.James A. Zoller, Houghton Coll., N.Y.

Library Journal

The latest collection by the 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner (The World Doesn't End), recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews