The dustjacket blurb for Charles Simic's Walking the Black Cat invites us to a world in which “a man waits at a bus stop for the love of his life, a woman (Lady Luck?) he's never met. The world's greatest ventriloquist who sits on a street corner uses passersby as dummies and speaks through us all. Hamlet's ghost walks the hallways of a Vegas motel.” And more inducements in the same vein. If only they had proved a less accurate harbinger of the poems themselves—which too often have the contrived goofiness, with portentous hints of significance for “us all,” that the blurbist promises. The best ones won't submit to their own glibness altogether, but on the whole I have the sense of a style running on automatic pilot, the urgencies that once called it into existence largely forgotten. Strange events do not erupt, but saunter lazily into view, voiced in such inert syntax and blasé affect as to seem oddly comfortable. Instead of a Borgesian dream tiger, Simic offers the leashed housecat of his title, which is, to judge by its gait, fat, sleepy, and a little bit spoiled.

As an instance of this volume's stylistic lassitude, consider the opening of “Lone Tree,” not one of the best passages in the book, but not the worst, either:

A tree spooked
By its own evening whispers.
Afraid to rustle,
Just now
Bewitched by the distant sunset.
Making a noise full of deep
Misgivings,
Like bloody razor blades
Being shuffled.

Lines 3-5 repeat the substance of lines 1-2, as if Simic belatedly had realized how weak the word “spooked” is, evoking B horror movies rather than the Abyss, but couldn't be bothered to start the poem over. “Misgivings,” ominously perched on a line by itself, fails to deliver the mystery or threat its isolation promises. And just what sort of noise do “bloody razor blades / Being shuffled” make, anyway? The syntax is as loose as the diction. Although sentence fragments can give an effect of swift associative leaps, or of surging movement (think of the opening of Williams's “Spring and All”), their main effect here is to slow and muffle the language, forcing verbs into participial or passive constructions, lest they startle or disturb. Throughout the book, there's very little interplay between sentence rhythm and line breaks. Sentences extending more than two or three lines are unusual, and as a rule syntactical pauses and line breaks coincide. Even poems that seem relatively intense often dissipate their force in trivializing endings (e.g., “Talking to Little Birdies,” “Against Winter,” “The Something”).

Simic, of course, is not without talent, and flames of imagination occasionally flicker amid the ashes. The best poems in this collection have a trace of urgency in them, some hint of what may have hurt their maker into poetry, to adapt Auden's phrase about Yeats. Urgency needn't mean largeness of theme; the loneliness of the speaker in “Late Train” is palpable, even though (or perhaps because) it makes no claim to cosmic profundity:

In the empty coach, far in the back,
I thought I could see one shadowy passenger
Raising his pale hand to wave to me
Or to put a watch to his ear,
While I stretched my neck to hear the tick.

The stretch of the sentence, across five lines, signals a modest increase of energy, and the potential cliché, “pale hand,” is rescued by the adjective “shadowy” in the previous line: the hand is the one part of the indistinct figure to catch the light. Others among the better poems have some political steel in them, such as “Cameo Appearance,” “The Conquering Hero Is Tired,” or “The Emperor.” In “Cameo Appearance,” the horrors Simic witnessed as a child in Yugoslavia become a film to be shown to “the kiddies,” in which the poet “had a small, nonspeaking part.” The numbed affect that elsewhere seems merely an all-purpose varnish for once seems appropriate to the occasion of speaking. But for the most part, this book is long on manner and short on substance, half-imagined and half-formed. It's time to take the black cat off its leash. Given more exercise and freedom, it may actually catch something.