Austerities: Poems

by Charles Simic

Poems record the author's observations on a wide range of subjects, including the natural world, city life, and his personal experiences

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008

Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.

Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize; and Scribbled in the Dark (2017). He is also an essayist, translator, editor, and professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught for over 30 years.

Simic has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His other honors and awards include the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the PEN Translation Prize. He served as the 15th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, and was elected as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2001. Simic has also been elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Reviews

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Austerities, published five years after Charon's Cosmology, could easily have been parts three through five of the same book. It has all the same strengths, and if it has a weakness it is that every once in a while the irony doesn't come off sounding quite as ironic as it should ("Positively Bucolic," for example, gets downright annoying in places-- as it is supposed to, but that doesn't lessen the annoyance). But when Simic is on, he is very, very on:

"Luckily, we had this Transylvanian waiter,
This ex-police sergeant, ex-dancing school instructor
Regarding whom we were in complete agreement
Since he didn't forget the toothpicks with the bill."
(--"East European Cooking")

Simic well deserves a spot in a canon as time progresses, and these two books will be an integral part of that.

Charon's Cosmology: **** ½
Austerities: ****

[Dustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simic has a way of writing poems that you know are important and meaningful, but the conviction is mysterious because his images are so simple and seemingly remote.
I found myself saying things like "of course it would" at strange lines such as "Still, how nice it would be - To catch a sight of a late-working executive...Turning a corner in a spiffy sharkskin suit."
Because he is right, he is right, but it is difficult to say why and about what.
He has man as a scared, simple animal, who approaching the street, "Looks both ways at the crossing / At two gusts of nothing and nothing."
Simic has an enlarging vision of the world.

[Fred · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love these '70s Braziller books by Simic (austerities, Dismantling the Silence, Charon's Cosmology, etc.) - the way he condenses and shows us a feeling in so few lines. I can't think of anyone more economical than him in this period. The works feel like they could come from any time. They feel like folk tales in 20 lines or less.

[Corey · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's so great.