Night Picnic

Night Picnic Synopsis

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet "e;illuminates the shadow side of life in poems as perfectly formed and directed as the beam of a flashlight"e; (Booklist).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."e;What is beautiful,' he writes in one poem, "e;is found accidentally and not sought after.

What is beautiful is easily lost."e; Simic is the metaphysician of the ordinary, a poet who reminds us of the mysteries of our daily lives."e;This first book of poems since 1999's Jackstraws continues Simic's familiar, unsettling methods and extends them into the terrain of older age . . .

Simic remains a powerful, and funny, chronicler of an individual world one where pastry, omelets and queen-size beds offer their ambiguous pleasures, and where, inseparably, 'the butchery of the innocent/ Never stops.' It is a world that should be familiar."e; -Publishers Weekly"e;Nabokovian in his caustic charm and sexy intelligence, Simic perceives the mythic in the mundane and pinpoints the perpetual suffering that infuses human life with both agony and bliss."e; -Booklist