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 guilelessness in the end serving to make us face How Awful It Is. “The World,” in the poem so named, chooses to “torture me / Every day” with its “many cruel instruments,” the torture today being two pictures of a woman and a child, first fleeing and then:

fallen
With bloodied heads
On that same winding road
With its cloudless sky
Of late summer
And its trees shivering
In the first cool breeze
On days when we put all
Our trust into the world
Only to be deceived.

This is one of the two archetypal Simics, lucid as yet another daybreak that brings us nothing but pain, the language plain, the anger huge and entirely implicit. The other voice, relieving dread yet still in touch with it, gives us breathing room. In “This morning,” the speaker begins: “Enter without knocking, hard-working ant.” The night passed has been troubled, but “Estella” did come to him, only to vanish:

You visit the same tailors the mourners do,
Mr. Ant. I like the silence between us,
The quiet—that holy state even the rain
Knows about Listen to her begin to fall,
As if with eyes closed,
Muting each drop in her wild-beating heart.

With his customary sure touch, Simic states in his prose book: “I'm in the business of translating what cannot be translated: being and its silence.” To transmute passion and its evanescence into a suddenly unironic request to a black ant is worthy of the end of Bishop's “Questions of Travel,” in which silence and rain are put to rather other excellent purposes.

Often, it must be said, Simic is notably more oblique than here. Sometimes the complicated oppressiveness of Eastern European (and other) governments is a steady undercurrent, but the syntax is frequently a bit skewed; in nearly 80 pages we are offered the consolation of a single and, as it were, accidental full rhyme. The voice can be detached to the point of unintended listlessness, and poem after poem is so ironically titled that on occasion we are unable to engage any other feeling.

A recurrent strategy is to start a poem in such a way as to require a reader to play constant catch-up, to piece together a prehistory—what happened before the first words are spoken—that begins to make sense of puzzlement. It isn't always possible, or at least it's not always worth the effort. Although the poems are more of a piece than in most books, Simic is a less even writer than one might expect. The great successes are only minimally more realized than the flat failures. Still, no other of these poets begins to manage the astringent, attacking wit Simic commands; one may have to go back to Eliot and his mentors Donne and Shakespeare to find the like.