The Lunatic

Starred review from February 16, 2015
The prolific Simic (New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012), former U.S. Poet Laureate and 1990 Pulitzer Prize–winner, graces readers with 70 grimly playful poems that confirm his position among the literary elite. The collection primarily revolves around nostalgia, aging, and unappreciated everyday wonders. Unvarnished yet profound, these poems show a boundless sensitivity underneath their impish presentation: “a ray of sunlight/ In the silence of the afternoon,/ ... found a long lost button/ Under some chair in the corner,// A teeny black one that belonged/ On the back of her black dress.” He addresses the past in his poems with judicious sentimentality and ambivalence, cautioning readers against becoming prisoners of memory: “Everything outside this moment is a lie.” While some poems dwell on the loneliness of old age (“That one remaining, barely moving leaf/ The wind couldn’t get to fall/ All winter long from a bare tree—/ That’s me!”), Simic battles this loneliness in the company of “Imagination, devil’s old helper,” who helps him breathe life into the inanimate—and greater significance into the animate—as he contemplates the ruminations of cows, admires the menace of fleas, and comments on the foreboding quality of black cats. Simic’s new collection is an outlandish and masterly mixture of morbidity and heartfelt yearning.

Starred review from March 15, 2015
The short, punchy lyric is Simic's forte, and The Lunatic, his newest volume of poetry, is driven by his signature melancholy and sardonic humor. In his 20 previous collections, this much-honored former poet laureate orchestrated unnervingly dissonant encounters and fraught juxtapositions on eerie city streets. Here, in stark and compressed poem-fables, he explores the dark side of the bucolic. The countryside and its humble dwellings may appear benevolent, but menacing forces gather in the shadows, and everyone is vulnerable. Simic writes of crows, doomed chickens, a small family graveyard, a cat slipping in and out / of the town jail, and trees that provide both ample shade and branches to hang yourself from, / Should you so desire. One shabby little town looks like / an abandoned movie set, and Simic's charactersa dog, an old womanseem like forgotten extras. Spiked with clues to larger mysteries, Simic's unnerving puzzle poems are works of insomniac witnessing and tempered love for our precious, haunted, rapturous, and dangerous world.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)