SOURCE: “The Secret World of Charles Simic,” in Field, No. 44, Spring, 1991, pp. 67-76.

In the following review, Janas explores the major mythological and philosophical themes in Simic's The Book of Gods and Devils.

What I see is the paradox. What shall I call it? The sacred and the profane? I like that point where the levels meet … We know what the Egyptians have said: as above, so below. This is the paradox, and I like to draw them close together. …

—Charles Simic, The Uncertain Certainty

Charles Simic follows phenomenology all the way back to its hermeneutic roots in his marvelous new collection, The Book of Gods and Devils. The Egyptian god alluded to in my epigraph, and identified by Simic in a new book of essays—Wonderful Words, Silent Truth—is Hermes Trismegistos, a.k.a. Thoth. He was really the start of it all for the philosopher...