Volume 48, Number 16 · October 18, 2001
Treasure Box
By Anthony Hecht
Night Picnic
by Charles Simic
Harcourt, 86 pp., $23.00
A Fly in the Soup
by Charles Simic
University of Michigan Press, 182 pp., $29.95
In our bicentennial year, Charles Simic and Mark Strand, two poets of kindred excellences and temperaments, published an anthology entitled Another Republic and devoted to seventeen European and Latin American poets whose work was (and still largely remains) outside the orbit and canon of this nation's taste and habit of mind. The seventeen included Vasko Popa, Yannis Ritsos, Fernando Pessoa, Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, Paul Celan, and Johannes Bobrowski, along with a few more familiar Nobel laureates-to-be. The editors lumped their poets into two general batches, the 'mythological,' a group that included Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, and Octavio Paz, and another group, the 'historical,' devoted to Yehudah Amichai, Paul Celan, Zbigniew Herbert, Czesl/aw Mil/osz, and Yannis Ritsos, while acknowledging that some of the poets fall between the two stools, or partake of both categories, while resisting identification with either one. They furthermore define the 'mythological' strain by deriving it from sources in Surrealism.
Review, 5320 words
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