Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Simic, Charles (Vol. 130) - Scott Edward Anderson (review date November-December 1993)

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Scott Edward Anderson (review date November-December 1993)

SOURCE: A review of Hotel Insomniac and Dime-Store Alchemy, in Bloomsbury Review, Vol. 13, No. 6, November-December, 1993, p. 12.

[In the following review, Anderson explains how the poems in Hotel Insomniac and the prose observations in Dime-Store Alchemy compliment each other, noting in particular Simic's interest in the meaning and purpose of art.]

“The world is beautiful but not sayable. That's why we need art,” Charles Simic writes in Dime-Store Alchemy. He refers to the artist Joseph Cornell but could have easily been describing his own work and focus. Like Cornell, Simic has been trying to translate the ineffable through his own inimitable language since Dismantling the Silence (Braziller, 1971) was published. Critics have often tried, without much success, to define the elusive, beguiling, and seductive quality of his poetry,...

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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