[The most distinctive quality of Simic's poetry] (I hesitate to say straight out its strength) seems actually to be its most signal limitation. This is a brilliant fluency of invention that enables him to sustain a uniform texture through a whole poem and a whole collection of poems—Dismantling the Silence—without its ever offering much substance for the mind to feed on. One would call it a natural metaphysics, except that the word suggests the essentially knotty poetry of the English seventeenth-century poets, and of their modern imitators, poetry which rewards the reader's intelligence with flight, and his diligence with release. The metaphysical conceit detonates in the mind at some depth from the surface, and the labour taken to unravel its complexities generates a light which is logically but mystically related to the substance of the figure chosen. In Charles Simic we have something totally different. He...