There is language and there are languages. Our obsession with translations from languages few of us can read with any cultural comprehension may be leading us away from the traditional connotative values of English into a Peter Pan world of raw and too often merely clever imagery. But for Charles Simic the encounter with a language and a poet alien to most of us has been decisive and healthy. From Vasco Popa, Simic has learned a tone and strategy unfamiliar to English and American poetry. Simic's best-known poems, like "Table," "Fork", "Knife," and "The Bird," present objects that seem at once too innocent and too self-realized to be products of the old Adamic vision. Merwin's more topographical vision is also a presence in Simic's poems, somewhat more so in his new collection, Classic Ballroom Dances…. This book features a number of fine poems in which the speaker himself...