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Publishers Weekly Review

It's hard to do justice to the charm and power of Joseph Cornell's boxes. His reliance on collage, indifference to technical display, and Surrealist mining of private obsession make him very much a modern artist, yet his work also brings to mind bourgeois parlors, the tidy vitrines of collectors, and the odds and ends children carry around for comfort and distraction. It is an art at once hermetic and matter-of-fact, sophisticated and simple. Appropriately, this study is neither a straightforward critical account of Cornell's art nor a merely literary embellishment of it, but rather a parallel text: written by Simic ( Hotel Insomnia ), one of our best poets, it includes his own poems and reminiscences, as well as quotations from a variety of other writers. Simic mingles biography and critical discussion with selections of writings from the artist's notebooks. The book emerges as a piece of writing constructed along the enigmatic lines of Cornell's art. And that art, as Simic sees it, gathers from the scattered pieces of the American past a new, redeeming reality; at heart, this art is a religious practice. Only seemingly random, Simic's approach develops both the plain detail of Cornell's life and illuminates the nature of his work. Illustrations. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, immigrated with his family to Chicago in 1954, and was educated at New York University, where he earned his BA in 1966. Although his native language was Serbian, he began writing in English. Some of his work reflects the years he served in the U.S. Army (1961--63). He has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation grant, and a National Endowment for the Arts award. "My poetry always had surrealistic tendencies, which were discouraged a great deal in the '50's," the poet said, but such tendencies were applauded in the 1970s and his reputation consequently flourished. His poems are about obsessive fears and often depict a world that resembles the animism of primitive thought. His work has affinities with that of Mark Strand and has in its turn produced several imitators.

His awards and honors included the PEN Translation Prize (1980), in 1990, he won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for "The World Doesn't End.", the Wallace Stevens Award 2007, Frost Medal (2011), Vilcek Prize in Literature (2011), and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (2014). He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.

Charles Simic died on January 10, 2023, at the age of 84.

(Bowker Author Biography)