The Life of Images

February 16, 2015
This essay collection may seem somewhat redundant, since its selections can be readily found in other books (except for five previously uncollected pieces), but it leaves no doubt that former poet laureate Simic wields a powerful pen. In artful, lucid, and sometimes humorous essays, he offers commanding insights on such diverse topics as poetry’s relationship to philosophy, the ravages of war, and the unpredictable beauties of film and music. In “Buster Keaton,” he writes of the silent-movie comedian, “What makes Keaton unforgettable is the composure and dignity he maintains in the face of what amounts to a deluge of misfortune.” In “My Secret,” Simic admits that he likes to write in bed and also reflects on the pleasure of writing in the kitchen, stating that, “All that’s left for the poet to do is garnish his poems with a little parsley and serve them to poetry gourmets.” In the powerful “Charles the Obscure,” about the blues guitarist Funny Papa Smith, Simic observes, “The blues poet has been where we are all afraid to go.” Readers may regret that Simic provides no introduction to shed light on the selection process for this book. Nonetheless, his wit shines and sparkles on every page.

March 15, 2015

Simic, an ethnic Serb who immigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia in 1954, has become a prominent voice in American letters. He garnered the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1990) and was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate in 2007. Simic has authored more than 30 books of poetry and several volumes of essays and memoirs, translated the works of Serbian poets into English, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books. This selection, containing 37 essays gleaned from previous collections and four uncollected essays, concentrates on the various manifestations of the image. The moving image is scrutinized in the work of Joseph Cornell and Buster Keaton; and the images of poetic metaphor are exemplified in Emily Dickinson, blues lyrics, and the work of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. There are several essays on the photograph (Paul Strand, Berenice Abbott, and Simic's family photos), the canvas (Odilon Redon, Saul Steinberg, and Hieronymus Bosch) and on the imagination exemplified through the intersection of poetry and philosophy. Simic invests several other essays with autobiographical detail affirming the individual over the tribe and abhorring sectarian or ethnic nationalism. VERDICT An eclectic and satisfying table prepared by a fine chef.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2015
Sure-handed distillation is Simic's style as an essayist as well as a poet, even as he unleashes his storyteller's magic. The Life of Images: Selected Prose is a free-wheeling and stimulating volume reaching back to the 1980s and moving forward to reclaim pieces from six earlier books along with previously uncollected works. Beginning with Why I Like Certain Poems more than Others, his wry and smart essays reveal the source of his abiding skepticism about humankind, namely his early, hungry, and precarious years in war-battered Belgrade. Wittily self-deprecating, he writes about his family, reading philosophy, food, and writing in bed. More scathingly, he describes the misery of watching the 1990s war in Yugoslavia on American television and decries the bane of nationalism. Simic anchors his deep trust in poetry to the fact that it always speaks for the individual, while a Buster Keaton film inspires him to declare, That's what great poetry is. A superb serenity in the face of chaos. He praises comic seriousness, notes that little poems say a great deal about the human condition, and avidly connects lyric poetry to the blues. Simic is piquantly engaging, shrewdly hilarious, and superbly discerning and moving in his elucidation of poetry's invaluable unexpectedness, subversiveness, and inexhaustibility.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)