“The Voice at 3 A.M.”
By Charles Simic
Harcourt, Inc., 2003
177 pp.
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Charles Simic is no stranger to praise. During the 44 years his writings have been published, he has become one of the most respected poets in America. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and has been awarded numerous fellowships. His work is the sole focus of entire college courses (at the University of Alabama, for one). An English professor at the University of New Hampshire, he is among the most elite of the academic poets, joining the likes of Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand, Adrienne Rich, and Donald Hall. The aura of elitism that surrounds these writers can be distracting enough to discourage the casual reader from checking out their work.
But in the case of Simic, don’t let that put you off. His brief poems are packed with so many surprises, so much striking language, and such bold irreverence that he overcomes the weight of his credentials. In a style all his own, he juxtaposes desolate imagery and a bleak view of life with bizarre humor. And though he may be a highbrow in some ways, referring to ancient philosophers and dead poets, he is also lowbrow enough in his language and topics to make up for it.
Simic’s latest collection, “The Voice at 3 A.M.,” brings together selections from his books spanning 1986 to 2001, and adds 19 new poems. There are so many great lines in this book that it’s hard to know where to start. “Night of distant guns, distant and comfortable” is a favorite of mine, but you might like “Small beer metaphysician, King of birdshit!” or “Selling sticks of gum door-to-door in my old age.”
The dominant themes in Simic’s poetry are darkness and twilight, autumn and winter, war, insomnia, desolation, compulsive thinking, prisons and motels. He also writes frequently about the homeless. He spent his childhood in German-occupied Yugoslavia during World War II, and the bleakness of his writing is often attributed to that experience.
But as depressing as these subjects might sound, he is usually joking in his poems, even as he acknowledges how grim things are. The voice in these poems never succumbs to despair, though it often marvels that life goes on. Simic neatly sums up the mood of his poems in “Death, The Philosopher.” After acknowledging the profound importance of death and the lesson it teaches, Simic writes,
Still, there’s no huff him.
Once he had a most unfortunate passion.
It came to an end.
He loved the way the summer dusk fell.
He wanted to have it falling forever.
It was not possible.
That was the big secret.
It’s dreadful when things get as bad as that —
But then they don’t!
In an odd way, Simic’s poems are life-affirming, even in their preoccupation with death. Humor is all over these poems, even the ones about World War II. In “Empires,” for example, he writes, “My grandmother prophesied the end / Of your empires, O fools! / She was ironing. The radio was on.” He then recounts, in casual and affecting verse, his grandmother condemning the occupying leader (maybe Hitler himself) as he made a speech over the radio.
This honoring of ordinary people over the famous and powerful is common to many of his poems. In “Toward Nightfall” he writes of “tragedies / Which supposedly are not / Tragedies in the absence of / Figures endowed with / Classic nobility of soul.” In the rest of the poem (one of his longest) he makes abundantly clear, through striking point-of-view shifts and expert line breaks (like “In the gray twilight / That went on hesitating / On the verge of a huge / Starless autumn night”) that ordinary people don’t lack this nobility. As the poem shifts to different people and places, the focus is intense and the details extraordinarily vivid.
I recommend “The Voice at 3 A.M.” without reservation. These poems are among the most surprising and imaginative you’ll ever read, and are crafted with remarkable control. If you like are direct, irreverent and bizarre poems, give this book a try.
Brian O’Keefe can be reached at [email protected]