I do not think Charles Simic's [Classic Ballroom Dances] will add to his reputation—a by now firmly established reputation for poems in the surrealist style that has become the academic poetry of the last two decades. Simic's own voice sounded clearly through the babble of his imitators. It was haunted, wryly imaginative, darkly self-possessed. And the poems themselves (their sound and size eventually led one to think of a new sub-genre: A Simic Poem) were distinguished by their unnerving attention to objects, dream images, cognitive traps. But among the three dozen new poems in Classic Ballroom Dances, there is not one to match his first successes. It is almost as if Simic had grown bored with his evident talent to write one sort of poem, yet was unable to write any other. As a result, the worst excesses of his characteristic style are carelessly forced; the poems...