“When our souls are happy,” Charles Simic has written, “they talk about food.” When my soul is happy, often enough, I want to talk about Mr. Simic.
A great deal has been written about his poetry, which is comic and elegiac in equal measure. It has an old world sensibility (Mr. Simic grew up in Belgrade during World War II, and his family fled bombing) that he pins to a new world lightness of heart.
In his very good new book of poems, “The Lunatic,” for example, a spring day makes him so happy that, even if he had to face a firing squad, he’d “Smile like a hairdresser/Giving Cameron Diaz a shampoo.”
For his poems, Mr. Simic has won a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. The cheapest, easiest way to catch up with his work is to find a copy of “Sixty Poems” (2007), a nearly perfect collection that was issued to celebrate his being named poet laureate of the United States.
Another new book, “The Life of Images: Selected Prose,” reminds us that Mr. Simic can be as intense (and as intensely charming) in his nonfiction. In fact, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t prize some of Mr. Simic’s essays as much, if not more, than I do his best poems.
“The Life of Images” has many things you’d expect from a poet’s nonfiction miscellany. There are book reviews, meditations on form, pieces on politics and moral themes. There is also a good deal of writing about photography and art, about which Mr. Simic is passionate and learned.
Yet what’s really special about this book is that it demonstrates what a melancholy baby this poet is, in all the best ways. Again and again, Mr. Simic returns to his favorite topics: old records, garlicky sausages, late nights, Buster Keaton movies, candles stuck into Chianti bottles, laughter, swearing, his lover’s pink toes. His enthusiasms warm you up like a wood stove.
About music, this poet is his own celestial jukebox. “I have heard just about every recording of popular music and jazz made between 1920 and 1950,” he confesses. “This is probably the most esoteric knowledge I possess. It is easier to talk to people about Tibetan Buddhism, Arab poetry in Medieval Spain or Russian icons, than about Helen Kane, Annette Hanshaw and Ethel Waters.”
Mr. Simic has you racing to Spotify to hear the blues songs he loves, from men and women like Walter Davis, Bertha Chippie Hill, Funny Papa Smith, Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell. He prints the lyrics to a favorite Lucille Bogan song, so sexually frank it makes your eyes water. “It seemed her purpose,” Mr. Simic writes, “was to intentionally terrify the prudes.”
As a young man, he played his records so many times that their hissing would “sound like rain, a summer downpour in the city when everyone runs for cover, at their worst like a sausage patty being fried in a pan.”
He can get a bit emotional about this stuff, but then so can a lot of us. One essay ends this way: “In that dive, in that all-night blues and soul club, we feel the full weight of our fate, we taste the nothingness at the heart of our being, we are simultaneously wretched and happy, we spit on it all, we want to weep and raise hell, because the blues, in the end, is about a sadness older than the world, and there’s no cure for that.”
Mr. Simic was an early foodie. His essay “Food and Happiness,” which appeared in the literary magazine Antaeus in 1992, was a pioneering manifesto and yelp of delight.
In it, he wrote, “Sadness and good food are incompatible.” He added: “A paella, a choucroute garnie, a pot of tripes à la mode de Caen, and so many other dishes of peasant origin guarantee merriment. The best talk is around that table. Poetry and wisdom are its company. The true Muses are cooks.” The essay described his “lifelong love affair with olives.” It spoke of how he and his brother, when their family moved to the United States in 1954, “visited the neighborhood supermarket twice a day to sightsee the junk food,” to gawk at the Spam, Fig Newtons and Hawaiian Punch. The only thing he couldn’t stomach was Wonder Bread.
Mr. Simic speaks often about his early childhood in these essays, the years in Belgrade with the “droning planes, deafening explosions, and people hung from lampposts.” He developed an innate loathing of strident nationalists, of ethnic divides, of “so-called great leaders and the collective euphorias they excite.”
About Serbia, he wrote in the late 2000s, with typical vividness: “It’s like a family that sits around the dinner table each evening pretending that granny had not stabbed the mailman with scissors and Dad had not tried to rape one of his little girls in the bathroom just this afternoon.”
Mr. Simic has lived for many years in rural New Hampshire, yet he’s not a fan of most pastoral poetry. “What about the farmer beyond that gorgeous meadow who works seven days a week from morning to night and is still starving?” he asks in an excellent essay reprinted here. “What about his sickly wife and their boy, who tortures cats?”
It is very Mr. Simic to add, “Nature as experience — making a tomato salad, say, with young mozzarella, fresh basil leaves, and olive oil — is better than any idea about Nature.”
It is also like him, in this same essay, to toss a lot of issues into the air and then comment, “Until we resolve these questions, a nap in a hammock on a summer afternoon is highly recommended.”
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