Charles Simic's poetry … has often urged on us the importance of the pre-civilized, even the pre-human, portion of ourselves, in a voice ranging from the beguiling spookiness of Eastern European folk tale, in Dismantling the Silence, to an all too modishly American brand of earthiness ("I piss in the sink / with a feeling of / eternity") in parts of Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk. Neither of these extremes is characteristic of Simic's grimmer, more diffident third collection [Charon's Cosmology]. The otherness of bodily existence, in relation to the mapped world we think we inhabit, is still the theme that draws forth Simic's most virtuoso conceits…. (pp. 103-04)

[Often] in this book, the reduction of civilized illusions is accomplished by suffering, rather than by the strangeness of inward powers. Childhood memories of war and poverty seem to lie behind many of these poems…. There can...