It is too simple (and simply wrong) to say that poets tailor their styles to gratify their critics. But critical demands, even if they do not force a poet to alter his style in a specified way, encourage him to change it in whatever way he will. An American myth of progress, a pioneer faith in Manifest Destiny, still shapes the preconceptions of many critics and poets in our literature. The absence of change, of visible movement, suggests failure. We expect each collection of poems to advance beyond its predecessor. Paradoxically, we often harbor with our demand for development and novelty, a conflicting desire for continuity, a wish to hear once more a voice we recognize. Hard to please, we want Simic to change, but not so much that his poems sound like those of someone else.

On the whole, Simic seems to have met such pressures in a measured and discerning way. He confidently begins Classic Ballroom Dances with a "Table of Delectable Contents," that shows not only his love for lists, but also his delightful mixture of insouciance and metaphysical seriousness…. Simic clearly means to proceed with the program of his earlier poetry—to search for a spiritual significance in physical objects….

Simic discovered early that even the most common objects—a spoon, a needle, a stone—assume an unsettling, but beguiling strangeness when they are regarded with the poet's imaginative fixity. Indeed, the most striking perception of his early poems was that inanimate objects pursue a life of their own and present, at times, a dark parody of human existence. Thus, the humble fork "resembles a bird's foot / Worn around the cannibal's neck." (p. 27)

The imaginative spirit of such poems is at the same time alienating and embracing. Even as Simic recognizes the strangeness of objects in their separate existence, he strains to assimilate them to his own experience. Or, making the more arduous effort in the opposite direction, he enters a foreign sphere of being and makes himself at home….

Simic has a beautiful two-line poem called "The Wind":

               Touching me, you touch
               The country that has exiled you.

This is his vision: man lives in apparent intimacy with the world surrounding him—touching and being touched by it—and yet all the while knowing himself to be an exile, a stranger who can at best only pretend to be at home here. Either the poet or the wind could be the speaker, and still the point would be the same….

[The] exile's consciousness still colors [Simic's] language as well as his view of existence. Having mastered a second language, Simic is especially aware of the power of words, and of the limits which words grope to overcome. His diction is resolutely plain: as with the everyday objects he writes about, he uncovers unexpected depth in apparently commonplace language. He chooses unremarkable words with remarkable deliberateness and sets them sturdily side by side in arrangements that seem somehow inevitable. Like any good poet, he understands the uses of silence; his poems stop when they ought to, after saying what can be said.

Understandably, Simic's very success in his accustomed modes seems to have made him wary of merely repeating himself. This anxiety may account for some of the less characteristic and, I feel, less successful pieces in the new book. Simic's new handling of comic effects, for example, is unreliable…. But when Simic tries to broaden his comic tone, he produces an unconvincing kind of surrealist slapstick, as in "Great Infirmities."…

A more promising experiment is the poem "Prodigy"—unusual in being, apparently, an actual childhood memory. Simic recalls learning to play chess in 1944 in a small house near a Roman graveyard…. The chess game, of course, becomes a symbol—of the patterns of conflict, danger and escape that make up life—but the poem otherwise treats personal experience directly, without the mediation of myth. It would be interesting to see more from Simic in this autobiographical vein; this is at once vivid and different.

Simic's willingness to balance change and continuity in his career is most clearly demonstrated by his new version of White, a book-length poem first published in 1972. Although Simic has honed his phrasing, rearranged sections, and added some new material, the poem remains recognizable to those who knew it before. The changes are unobtrusive—fine adjustments rather than wholesale tinkering…. (p. 28)

The poem itself is Simic's longest, most difficult, but most rewarding work. White, from which all the colors of the spectrum are derived, evidently represents the source in or beyond the unconscious mind from which all poetic images are drawn. In keeping with the established themes of Simic's poetry, White appears throughout the poem in enigmatic flashes, suggesting an invisible order of being impinging what is visible. It represents the mystery which the poet seeks to evoke even while knowing that it exists beyond the reach of elucidation….

In this poem about the creation of something, however imperfect, out of a pristine nothingness, Simic is remarkably successful at drawing the reader into his own creative moment. Reading these black words set on a white page, we seem to be with the poet in the very act of writing, to hear the words uttered out of a potent surrounding silence…. (p. 29)