Contemporary Literary Criticism | Simic, Charles (Vol. 130) - Bruce Bennett (review date 12 March 1983)

Bruce Bennett (review date 12 March 1983)

SOURCE: “Poems Magical, Poems Mordant,” in Nation, Vol. 236, No. 10, March 12, 1983, pp. 314-15.

[In the following excerpted review, Bennett admires the spareness and clarity of poems that make up Austerities.]

[In Austerities] Charles Simic is a story teller, but his tales are mordant. “Rosalia” begins typically:

An especially forlorn human specimen
Answers a marriage-ad
On a street of compulsory misfortune,
One drizzly November afternoon …

They are set in landscapes—general cityscapes—despoiled by history (“From Tooth Crowned With Gold,” “Punch Minus Judy”), and in a climate almost unremittingly harsh. Scarcity is the rule and practically everyone practices “austerities” of some sort. Even on those rare occasions of abundance, the results are not precisely satisfying:

We ate so well after the funeral
In that shack by the town...

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