Charon's Cosmology

Charles Simic

Charles Simic, Charon's Cosmology (George Braziller, 1977)
Charles Simic, Austerities (George Braziller, 1982)

These two of Simic's entries in the Braziller poetry series (his last before it shut down in 1978, and his second upon its resurrection) read as two parts of a whole, so it makes some sense to review them together. Charon's Cosmology, nominated for the National Book Award, is the shorter of the two by a few pages. The usual wit, wisdom, and irony to be found in Simic is here in spades, along with some wanderings down various life paths to find new ways of looking at things for the viewer's pleasure.

“...I look at times over his shoulder
At all that whiteness. The snow is falling,
As you'd expect. A drop of ink
Gets buried easily, like a footprint.

I too would get lost but there's his shadows
On the wall, like a perched owl....”
(--“Poem”)

Austerities, published five years after Charon's Cosmology, could easily have been parts three through five of the same book. It has all the same strengths, and if it has a weakness it is that every once in a while the irony doesn't come off sounding quite as ironic as it should (“Positively Bucolic,” for example, gets downright annoying in places-- as it is supposed to, but that doesn't lessen the annoyance). But when Simic is on, he is very, very on:

“Luckily, we had this Transylvanian waiter,
This ex-police sergeant, ex-dancing school instructor
Regarding whom we were in complete agreement
Since he didn't forget the toothpicks with the bill.”
(--”East European Cooking”)

Simic well deserves a spot in a canon as time progresses, and these two books will be an integral part of that.