New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012
by Charles Simic
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 355 pp., $30.00
Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell
by Charles Simic
New York Review Books, 82 pp., $14.00 (paper)
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Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell was reissued in 2011 and now is followed by the publication of his New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012. The two books together give us a rich picture of Simic’s art: like Cornell’s boxes, Simic’s poems are little rectangles full of surprising juxtapositions, optical illusions, effects of scale, dreams, riddles, jokes, demurrals, boasts, all framed arbitrarily and rather impersonally by Simic’s manner, which finds an eerie evenness no matter what his poems contain.
Simic, who emigrated to the United States from Yugoslavia, via Paris, when he was sixteen, has…