The Lunatic: Poems
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About this ebook
From Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate Charles Simic comes a dazzling collection of poems as original, meditative, and humorous as the legendary poet himself.
This latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic, one of America’s most celebrated poets, demonstrates his revered signature style—a mix of understated brilliance, wry melancholy, and sardonic wit. These seventy luminous poems range in subject from mortality to personal ads, from the simple wonders of nature to his childhood in war-torn Yugoslavia.
For over fifty years, Simic has delighted readers with his innovative form, quiet humor, and his rare ability to limn our interior life and concisely capture the depth of human emotion. These stunning, succinct poems—most no longer than a page, some no longer than a paragraph—validate and reinforce Simic’s importance and relevance in modern poetry.
Charles Simic
Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.
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Book preview
The Lunatic - Charles Simic
I
TODAY’S MENU
All we got, mister,
Is an empty bowl and a spoon
For you to slurp
Great mouthfuls of nothing,
And make it sound like
A thick, dark soup you’re eating,
Steaming hot
Out of the empty bowl.
BREEDER OF BLACK CATS
Carrying a fresh litter of them
In pockets of his overcoat
As he meanders down the street,
Letting a kitten loose here and there
To run free as a warning to me
And to everyone else in sight,
While donning his dark glasses,
Hoping not to be recognized
Entering a flower shop to buy flowers
For one or two upcoming funerals.
THE LUNATIC
The same snowflake
Kept falling out of the gray sky
All afternoon,
Falling and falling
And picking itself up
Off the ground,
To fall again,
But now more surreptitiously,
More carefully
As night strolled over
To see what’s up.
O SPRING
O Spring, if I were to face a firing squad
On a day like this, I’d wear
One of your roadside flowers
Behind my ear, lift my chin high
Like a pastry cook standing
Next to a prize-winning wedding cake,
Smile like a hairdresser
Giving Cameron Diaz a shampoo.
Lovely day, you passed through town
Like a Mardi Gras parade
With ladies wearing colorful plumage on their heads
Riding on your floats,
Leaving the moon in the sky
To be our night watchman and check with its lantern
On every last patch of snow
That may be hiding in the woods.
ABOUT MYSELF
I’m the uncrowned king of the insomniacs
Who still fights his ghosts with a sword,
A student of ceilings and closed doors,
Making bets two plus two is not always four.
A merry old soul playing the accordion
On the graveyard shift in the morgue.
A fly escaped from a head of