SOURCE: “A World of Foreboding: Charles Simic,” in Soul Says: On Recent Poetry, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 102-16.

In the following essay, Vendler presents an overview of Simic's major themes and techniques.

Charles Simic's riddling poems, for all that they reproduce many things about his century (its wars, its cities, its eccentrics, and so on) in the end chiefly reproduce the Simic sieve—a sorting machine that selects phenomena that suit Simic's totemic desire. There is no escape hatch in a Simic poem: you enter it and are a prisoner within its uncompromising and irremediable world:

The trembling finger of a woman Goes down the list of casualties On the evening of the first snow. 

The house is cold and the list is long. 

All our names are included. 

This short poem, entitled “War,” from the collection Hotel Insomnia (1992), exhibits all the hallmarks of the...