SOURCE: A review of A Wedding in Hell, in Georgia Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 4, Winter, 1995, pp. 938-41.

In the following review, Kitchen discusses Simic's political poetry in A Wedding in Hell.

[One] way poets have handled … political material is to release it from its historical ties, creating … a kind of imaginative transmutation. Charles Simic's latest book, A Wedding in Hell, does just this. The poems are vintage “Simic”—cool, surprising, an odd mix of images that disturb as often as they satisfy.

Simic, who was born in Yugoslavia, must, like most of us, respond to the nightly images on the television screen as the people of the former republic wage a multifaceted civil war. But his poems have not been written for this context; instead, they seem to aspire to timelessness by displaying a distanced universality reminiscent of the poetry of Vasco Popa or Jean Follain.

Simic's poems...