Walking the Black Cat.

Nash, Susan Smith

Charles Simic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, has always possessed a disturbing vision of humanity, one which is not easily explained away. Some critics have pointed to his Yugoslav origins and the difficulties of resolving the legacies of an East European consciousness with the self-righteously chipper destruction industries of Cold War America.

Simic's life history does not tell us everything, though. However useful biography is in locating an author within a historical or sociopolitical context, it is at best only a partial view of an art production, particularly poetry. In the case of Simic, the gothic plays such an important role in the consciousness of the work that any facile political allegorization or cultural criticism should be avoided, although it is certainly tempting to appropriate his work as a pungent critique of our fin-de-millennium landscape.

In Walking the Black Cat highly allusory poems place the human mind within a continuum of consciousness, with a focus on the attempt to understand life by means of juxtapositions with death. The literary allusions refer to and incorporate more or less well-known works in which death is linked with madness, emotional passage, and eventual union that leads to previously undiscovered knowledge. The title of the collection also evokes images of Edgar Allan Poe, while the various poems allude directly or indirectly to authors; in doing so, Simic populates his world with a familiar host of writers. For example, in "Relaxing in a Madhouse" Moses, Lincoln, Socrates, Adam, and Eve share the same space as the "general [who] was busy with the ant farm in his head."

As with many works that propose a manner of reperceiving life by approaching death, sexuality is one vehicle by which the individual constructs a paradigm of self-awakening. Interestingly, Simic's poems are not erotic. In contrast, there is a Rabelaisian enthusiasm for de-idealizing seduction and repositioning desire in the earth- and flesh-based epistemologies. In "The Road in the Clouds" sexuality invokes energy and abandon: "Your undergarments and mine, / Sent flying around the room / Like a storm of white feathers / Striking the window and ceiling." In "Don't Wake the Clouds" Simic demystifies the female body with its "boobs flapping" while attempting to preserve the impact of a moment of union that is as desired as sleep but which is inevitably viewed as a harbinger of death.

Walking the Black Cat displays the best of Simic's abilities to construct multileveled poetry while maintaining accessibility through tangible, concrete scenes of humans searching for contact. There are repetitions of images interwoven throughout the collection that make the individual poems cohere as a whole. At times, the repetition makes a rather heavy-handed thematic presence, but the effect does reinforce the inescapable sense that a Poe-like obsession exists here. Obsession, in Simic's world, may be the only way through taboos and other barriers to self-expression and self-discovery.

Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma