Master of Disguises

Charles Simic has been around for along time and has seen a great deal. He was born in Belgrade in 1938 and his early years were spent, with his family, as displaced people in war-torn Europe. This difficult beginning, coupled with stories gleaned from other refugees along the way, has informed Simic’s poetry, and his take on life. He immigrated to the U.S. with his family in 1954, at the age of 16, and settled in Chicago. He gained his BA from New York University.

Simic has written a vast quantity of poetry including The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Walking the Black Cat: Poems (1996), which was a National Book Award in Poetry finalist; and Selected Poems: 1963–2003 (2004), winner of the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize. In 2007 Simic received the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in recognition of his outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry and was selected to be the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, succeeding Donald Hall. He has also written several prose volumes and translated works of many other writers including Gunter Grass. He is currently professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire.

Simic has had a distinguished career as a poet; Master of Disguise is his 20th published collection. His style is referred to as minimalist and his subjects, while they come from the real observed world, act to extend our understanding of far larger concepts:

Sightseeing in the Capital

These grand old buildings
With their spacious conference rooms,
Leather-padded doors,
Where they weigh life and death
Without a moment of fear
Of ever being held accountable,

And then withdraw to dine in style
And drink to each other’s health
In private clubs and country estates,
While we linger on the sidewalk
Admiring the rows of windows
The evening sun has struck blind.

“Sightseeing in the Capital” is an illustration of Simic’s casual observation becoming more than it started out to be. As with the other poems in the first two sections of the collection, Simic is looking out at what people do to each other. Here he begins with the grandeur of the architecture in Washington, DC, and in the space of twelve lines pointedly comments on the detachment and unaccountability of America’s leaders.

Master of Disguises addresses a number of events and global crises in a very similar way. Simic uses the mundane and the quotidian as vehicles for his social commentary:

Wildflowers

There were wildflowers along the road to hell.
The wind blew and the flowers
Danced in the ditches, alone or in pairs,
In that cheerful way flowers have.
You had to be there to see them
And the guard towers coming into view.

I wasn’t. Still, one hot summer afternoon
As I lay resting, their bright colors came to me,
And that dusty road and that long ditch
Where the wind played with them
Carrying their scent past the barbed wire,
Or so I thought, too scared to imagine the rest.

This poem speaks of wildflowers, their scent and color. The language is positive, relaying the bounty and heat of summer. Yet the subject is war and the evil done to others. The event could be the death camps of WW2, the forced marches of Vietnam, the road into Gaza, or into Guantanamo. The poem, and the collection, says more than is at first apparent. The whole is considerably more than the sum of its parts.

The second half of the collection, the last three sections, seem more personal, more rooted in Simic’s day to day life. In these poems we get a real sense of the powerful voice that he possesses. Again he tends to speak of the everyday, the commonplace, and again his wonderful use of language and imagery gives us so much more:

Summer Storm

I’m going over to see what those weeds
By the stone wall are fretting about.
Perhaps they don’t care for the way
The shadows creeps across the lawn
In the silence of the afternoon.

The sky keeps being blue,
Though we hear no birds,
See no butterflies among the flowers,
No ants running over our feet.
As for the trees in our yard,

They bend their branches ever so slightly
In deference to something
About to make its entrance
Of which we know nothing,
Spellbound as we are by the deepening quiet.

Charles Simic is a master. He seems to have the innate ability to create something out of nothing, to make words mean so much more. This collection, Master of Disguises, truly showcases his minimalist style and his great vision. The poems are short and sad and wryly amusing at the same time. Best of all they are true, they are us.