GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE 2005International Winner Book: Selected Poems: 1963-2003
Poet: Charles Simic
Publisher: Faber and Faber Click the book cover or title to purchase Selected Poems: 1963-2003 online. Read an excerpt from Selected Poems: 1963-2003. Enjoy audio and video clips of Charles Simic reading from Selected Poems: 1963-2003. Biography  Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has published five books of essays, a memoir, numerous translations and sixteen collections of poetry. Born in 1938 in Belgrade Yugoslavia, Simic immigrated to the United States in 1952 and saw his first poems published in 1959. In 1961 he was drafted into the US Army and in 1966 earned his Bachelor’s degree at New York University, publishing his first full-length collection of poems What the Grass Says in 1967. Since then he has published more than 60 books in the United States including My Noiseless Entourage (2005), Jackstraws (Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times 1999), Walking the Black Cat (finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry 1996), A Wedding in Hell (1994), Hotel Insomnia (1992), The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (for which he received the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1990), Selected Poems: 1963 - 1983 (1990), and Unending Blues (1986). He has also published many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian and Macedonian and Slovenian poetry and has twice won the Pen International Translation Award. Amongst his many accomplishments and accolades, Simic was the Guest Editor of The Best American Poetry 1992, was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000 and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1973, Simic has lived in New Hampshire where he is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. Simic has been selected by the Griffin trustees as a judge for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize. Judges’ Citation “Simic is something of a magician, a conjuror. Out of nothing it seems, out of thin air, the poems appear before our eyes. One apparently casual observation leads to another, and suddenly, exponentially, we are spellbound. It is a trick many have tried to imitate but few have achieved. At the centre of Simic’s art is a disarming, deadpan precision, which should never be mistaken for simplicity. Everything appears pared back to the solid and the essential, and it is this economy of vocabulary and clarity of diction which have made his poetry so portable and so influential wherever it is published. Simic is one of the few poets of our time to achieve both critical and popular acclaim; he is genuinely quotable, and it is entirely possible that some of his phrases and lines will lodge in the common memory. Without any hint of loftiness, then, and from a position which is entirely his own, Simic manages to speak to the many and not just the few.” My Shoes | Shoes, secret face of my inner life:
Two gaping toothless mouths,
Two partly decomposed animal skins
Smelling of mice nests. My brother and sister who died at birth
Continuing their existence in you,
Guiding my life
Toward their incomprehensible innocence. What use are books to me
When in you it is possible to read
The Gospel of my life on earth
And still beyond, of things to come? I want to proclaim the religion
I have devised for your perfect humility
And the strange church I am building
With you as the altar. Ascetic and maternal, you endure:
Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men,
With your mute patience, forming
The only true likeness of myself. From Selected Poems: 1963-2003, by Charles Simic
Copyright © 2004 |
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