- 96 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet "illuminates the shadow side of life in poems as perfectly formed and directed as the beam of a flashlight" (
Booklist).
The poems in Charles Simic's new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the morning to the fingerprints on a stranger's front door; from waiters in an empty restaurant to the decorations in a window of a funeral home; from a dog tied to a chain to a homeless man sleeping at the foot of a skyscraper; and other moments of solitude and clear vision.
"What is beautiful,' he writes in one poem, "is found accidentally and not sought after. What is beautiful is easily lost." Simic is the metaphysician of the ordinary, a poet who reminds us of the mysteries of our daily lives.
"This first book of poems since 1999's Jackstraws continues Simic's familiar, unsettling methods and extends them into the terrain of older age . . . Simic remains a powerful, and funny, chronicler of an individual world one where pastry, omelets and queen-size beds offer their ambiguous pleasures, and where, inseparably, 'the butchery of the innocent/ Never stops.' It is a world that should be familiar." — Publishers Weekly
"Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss." — Booklist
The poems in Charles Simic's new collection evoke a variety of settings and images, from New York City to small New England towns; from crowds spilling onto the sidewalk on a hot summer night to an abandoned wooden church and a car graveyard overgrown with weeds. His subjects range from a bakery early in the morning to the fingerprints on a stranger's front door; from waiters in an empty restaurant to the decorations in a window of a funeral home; from a dog tied to a chain to a homeless man sleeping at the foot of a skyscraper; and other moments of solitude and clear vision.
"What is beautiful,' he writes in one poem, "is found accidentally and not sought after. What is beautiful is easily lost." Simic is the metaphysician of the ordinary, a poet who reminds us of the mysteries of our daily lives.
"This first book of poems since 1999's Jackstraws continues Simic's familiar, unsettling methods and extends them into the terrain of older age . . . Simic remains a powerful, and funny, chronicler of an individual world one where pastry, omelets and queen-size beds offer their ambiguous pleasures, and where, inseparably, 'the butchery of the innocent/ Never stops.' It is a world that should be familiar." — Publishers Weekly
"Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss." — Booklist
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Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access Night Picnic by Charles Simic in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & American Poetry. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Contents
- Copyright
- Part I
- Past-Lives Therapy
- Street of Jewelers
- Three Doors
- The Avenue of Earthly Delights
- Couple at Coney Island
- Angel Tongue
- Unmade Beds
- Firecracker Time
- Sunday Papers
- Cherry Blossom Time
- People Eating Lunch
- Sweet Tooth
- The One to Worry About
- The Golden Age of Opera
- The Improbable
- My Father Attributed Immortality to Waiters
- Window Decorator
- Part II
- The Altar
- Bible Lesson
- For the Very Soul of Me
- Stand-In
- The Devil Minds His Own Children
- Demonology
- Sleepwalkers
- And Then I Think
- Leaving an Unknown City
- Views From a Train
- Along With the Name Came His Shadow
- Book Lice
- Madge Put On Your Teakettle
- The Loons
- The Secret of the Yellow Room
- Dog on a Chain
- Burning Edgar Allan Poe
- The Cemetery
- Summer in the Country
- I Climbed a Tree to Make Sure
- The Truth About Us
- Roadside Stand
- New Red Sneakers
- Grand Theatrics
- The Number of Fools
- Tree of Subtleties
- Jar of Fireflies
- We Were Adding and Subtracting
- With Heart Racing
- Part III
- The Grand Casino
- In Solitary
- In the Rathole
- Drawing a Blank
- The Inexplicable
- Blind Typist
- Death’s Little Helpers
- We All Have Our Hunches
- Night Picnic
- Whispered in the Ear
- In the Courtroom
- Car Graveyard
- Wooden Church
- Gas Station
- The Unseen Hand
- Interrogating Mr. Worm
- Another Doomsday Sect
- No One in the Room
- The Lives of the Alchemists
- With Paper Hats Still on Our Heads
- I’ve Had My Little Stroll
- The Cackle
- Acknowledgment
- About the Author