[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 Gestapo. In essays, he has described himself as a lonely, frightened boy, sleepless as bombs fell. But there is rarely anything overtly autobiographical in his poems, except the lingering mood of being orphaned by logic and culture: “I spent my childhood on a cross / In a yard full of weeds, / White butterflies, and white chickens.”

In his 11th volume, Hotel Insomnia, Mr. Simic continues to explore the ghost town he has limned in past collections. It is a world of empty cities filled with empty storefronts, “millions of empty rooms with TV sets turned on.” The poet wanders past prisons and convents and theaters in flames, occasionally spying the shadow of someone he knows or used to know, “my mother and her old dog” or, in “Missing Child”:

You of the dusty, sun-yellowed picture
I saw twenty years ago
On the window of a dry-cleaning store.
I thought of you again tonight,
In this chilly room where I sat by the window
Watching the street,
As your mother must've done every night,
And still does, for all I know.

Hotel Insomnia is not Mr. Simic's most focused or freshest collection. He himself concedes that he's sleepwalking in “the same old city, the same old street.” The repetition is intentional, of course. The reader circles images like a sleeping man circling the same hypnagogic thought over and over. Occasionally the insomniac treading the “gloomy corridors” feels more like a tic than a dynamic means of exploring memory and perception. Yet individual poems are breathtaking—like “The Prodigal,” in which “Everything is a magic ritual, / A secret cinema,” and the poet's trademark tropes seem almost dewy in their immediacy.

Mr. Simic operates like the spiders that frequently creep into his poems. He balances himself on the web of the poem and lies in wait for the reader. The reader is that lone fly on the ceiling—another favorite image. The web's design might be familiar, but more often than not, it still does the trick.