Night Picnic

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.