Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Simic, Charles (Vol. 130) - Lisa Zeidner (review date 21 March 1993)

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Lisa Zeidner (review date 21 March 1993)

SOURCE: “Empty Beds, Empty Nests, Empty Cities,” in New York Times, March 21, 1993, pp. 14-15.

[In the following review, Zeidner finds Insomniac Hotel occasionally redundant but many of the individual poems “breathtaking.”]

Few contemporary poets have been as influential—or as inimitable—as Charles Simic. For more than 30 years his work has claimed citizenship to its own dreamlike land, an elusive place hard to pinpoint. His poems are like dense medieval towns seen from the air: you get a sharp view, “time only for a glimpse,” before the view clouds up and you're not sure where you are or even when you are, whether awake or asleep. The dislocation is both spooky and seductive.

Mr. Simic migrated to the United States from Yugoslavia in 1954, and his haunting images have roots in war-torn Europe, where, as a small child, he watched his father being arrested by the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Hayden Carruth (review date Summer 1971)
   2. James Atlas (review date February 1975)
   3. Richard Jackson (essay date Winter 1980)
   4. Peter Schmidt (essay date Fall 1982)
   5. Bruce Bennett (review date 12 March 1983)
   6. Charles Simic with Sherod Santos (interview date 1984)
   7. Kenneth Funsten (review date 16 March 1986)
   8. Peter Stitt (review date Spring 1987)
   9. Marci Janas (review date Spring 1991)
   10. Steven Cramer (review date January 1992)
   11. Ileana A. Orlich (essay date Spring 1992)
   12. Edward Hirsch (review date 21 December 1992)
   13. Lisa Zeidner (review date 21 March 1993)
   14. Tam Lin Neville (review date Spring 1993)
   15. Philip Miller (essay date Summer 1993)
   16. Scott Edward Anderson (review date November-December 1993)
   17. Judith Kitchen (review date Winter 1995)
   18. Christopher Merrill (review date 19 March 1995)
   19. Helen Vendler (essay date 1995)
   20. Charles Simic with Molly McQuade (interview date 1995)
   21. David Sofield (review date 13 January 1996)
   22. David Bafer (review date April 1996)
   23. Paul Breslin (review date July 1997)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright