SOURCE: “Empty Beds, Empty Nests, Empty Cities,” in New York Times, March 21, 1993, pp. 14-15.

In the following review, Zeidner finds Insomniac Hotel occasionally redundant but many of the individual poems “breathtaking.”

Few contemporary poets have been as influential—or as inimitable—as Charles Simic. For more than 30 years his work has claimed citizenship to its own dreamlike land, an elusive place hard to pinpoint. His poems are like dense medieval towns seen from the air: you get a sharp view, “time only for a glimpse,” before the view clouds up and you're not sure where you are or even when you are, whether awake or asleep. The dislocation is both spooky and seductive.

Mr. Simic migrated to the United States from Yugoslavia in 1954, and his haunting images have roots in war-torn Europe, where, as a small child, he watched his father being arrested by the Gestapo. In essays...