Charles Simic is almost unique in American poetry. He was born in another country, into another language. His middle European, Yugoslavian origins still make him an immigrant, an outsider to formal and experiential assumptions that most American poets are not even aware they have. Not that Simic is not an American poet. In fact, Classic Ballroom Dances … is more in the American grain of [William Carlos] Williams than any recent collection one can call to mind. It is a question of sensibility. Simic's profoundly ironic and gnomic distance, his gallows humor, his implacable sense of the absurd come from a source at one remove from the popular, sometimes sentimental attitudes about what we call experience. His taproot runs to something older than social culture, deeper than the social sources of the individual. The real figures in his poems are from primitive folklore, tales, a medieval shadow-world of the...