Charles Simic Biography

American poet, born in Yugoslavia; he went to the USA in 1949, and was educated at the University of Chicago and New York University. Simic became professor of English and director of the creative writing programme at the University of New Hampshire. His first book of poems was What the Grass Says (1967); his other books include White (1970), Dismantling the Silence (1971), Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk (1974), Charon's Cosmology (1977), Classic Ballroom Dances (1980), Austerities (1982), Weather Forecast for Utopia & Vicinity (1983), and Unending Blues (1986). His translation of I. Lalic's poems (with C. W. Truesdale) as Fire Garden appeared in 1970, followed by translations of Vasko Popa's The Little Box (1970), Four Modern Yugoslav Poets (1970), Vasko Popa's Homage to the Lame Wolf (1979, 1987), and I. Lalic's Rollcall of Mirrors: Selected Poems (1988). The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry appeared in 1985. Simic's memory of his wartime European childhood of devastated cities and landscapes gives a dimension of the surreal to his work, which he blends with the tradition of American gothic, so that his poems are often haunted by a stark humour. Simic uses figures and locations from ancient myth and rituals, biblical, pagan, and legendary, as a way of placing our present preoccupations in a wider frame of historical and social reference.