SOURCE: A review of Selected Poems 1963-1983 and The Book of Gods and Devils, in Poetry, Vol. CLIX, No. 4, January, 1992, pp. 227-34.

In the following review, Cramer examines elements of Simic's poetry throughout his career that effectively distinguish him from other poets of his generation.

Though often associated with the “new surrealists” of the 1970s—American poets influenced by “deep imagist” elders like Bly, Wright, Merwin, Kinnell et al.—Charles Simic deserves to be distinguished from this group on at least two counts. First, as a native of Yugoslavia, his attachment to riddles, proverbs, magic formulas, and nursery rhymes has a bona fide regional pedigree, above and beyond the hours he logged studying folklore in the New York Public Library. More important, his memories of growing up in war-torn Belgrade provide an experiential groundwork for the primeval violences in his work. From the earliest poems in his Selected...