SOURCE: “Four and a Half Books,” in Poetry, Vol. CLXX, No. 4, July, 1997, pp. 226-39.

In the following review, Breslin asserts that Simic relys on his reputation in Walking the Black Cat rather than breaking new poetic ground.

The dustjacket blurb for Charles Simic's Walking the Black Cat invites us to a world in which “a man waits at a bus stop for the love of his life, a woman (Lady Luck?) he's never met. The world's greatest ventriloquist who sits on a street corner uses passersby as dummies and speaks through us all. Hamlet's ghost walks the hallways of a Vegas motel.” And more inducements in the same vein. If only they had proved a less accurate harbinger of the poems themselves—which too often have the contrived goofiness, with portentous hints of significance for “us all,” that the blurbist promises. The best ones won't submit to their...