Contemporary Literary Criticism | Simic, Charles (Vol. 130) - David Sofield (review date 13 January 1996)

David Sofield (review date 13 January 1996)

SOURCE: A review of A Wedding in Hell, in America, Vol. 174, No. 1, January 13, 1996, p. 18.

[In the following review, Sofield offers a mixed assessment of A Wedding in Hell.]

In the prose-poem “Voice from the Cage,” God seems to appear as “Mr. Zoo Keeper,” and we animals know that “sorrow, sickness, and fleabites are our lot. The rabbits still screw but their weakness is optimism. … I've dyed my hair green like Baudelaire. … Ours is a circus of quick, terrified glances.” End of poem. In the penultimate poem of a A Wedding in Hell, entitled “Mystery Writer,” God figures as a genre author whose apparent interest is to obscure our understanding of urban life. And this poem begins with the deceptively easy “I figured, well, since I can't sleep / I'll go for a walk.”

Occasionally a whole short poem will speak in a welcomely guileless voice, the...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass