5.25 x 8. 144 pgs. (1986) Paper 978-0-472-06359-8 $16.95T  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Look Inside Series Poets on Poetry Subjects Literary Studies--American Literature / Literary Studies--Poetry and Poetry Criticism

The Uncertain Certainty
Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry

Charles Simic

Named 2007 U.S. Poet Laureate

Provides a critical and autobiographical context for viewing Simic's poetry

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About the Book

"In the beginning, always, a myth of origins of the poetic act. A longing to lower oneself one notch below language, to touch the bottom—that place of 'original action and desire,' to recover our mute existence, to re-create what is unspoken and enduring in words of the poem, and thus live twice as it were. Like our ancient ancestors who inhabited an animistic universe, the poet claims the interconnectedness and sentience of all things. This is what haunts: a world where magic is possible, where chance reigns, where metaphors have their supreme logic, where imagination is free and truthful."
—Charles Simic

The Uncertain Certainty provides a rich critical and autobiographical background against which we may view Charles Simic's major contributions to modern American poetry. Subjects covered in the collection range from Simic's recollections of his childhood in World War II Yugoslavia, his work as a translator, his interest in surrealism and other aspects of modernism, to the various issues that concern the poets of his generation.