A complex collection, Simic combines contemporary realism with a European postwar surrealist sensibility in poems that reflect the pain of war and dislocation. At times it feels familiar, covering stylistic terrain travelled by famous European post-war poets. However, the book is no small accomplishment for someone writing in an adopted language. This is Simic's first foray into writing English poetry. In his acknowledgments, Simic writes: “This is a painful book I consider my private poetry donation to the English Language.”

Simic moved to Canada in 1996, in the aftermath Bosnian war, and the poems are imbued with the tragedy of war:

"I saw that human feet shrink two sizes when a
person dies. On the streets of Sarajevo you could see so many shoes in pools of blood. Every time I went
out I tied my shoelaces so tight my feet turned blue."

The poem ends with the speaker quoting his mother, concerned that if he is killed he should at least be found wearing clean underwear.

"What a shame for our family, she’d say.
To be killed without dignity. God forbid!" (What I saw).

In “A Soldier Sings an Anthem to the Cactus Flower” Simic's surrealist influence is displayed:

"Obedient, sober, mute as a number,
I speak the sharp tongue of the shiny sword.
Nameless, fearless, tough, and cold
I live in the house set on fire."
(A Soldier Sings an Anthem to the Cactus Flower)

Even in this love poem (or lust poem) called “Making Love” war imagery creeps in::

"In the tart wine smell of their sweat
he listens to their bodies speak
‘mine...mine...mine...’

Seagulls arrive bearing the scent of burnt wings
which they gently deposit on the bed—
that burning lake...

His palm slides further down toward her belly
to where the minefield begins.
Where fear
fashions crewel-work out of barb wire."

What’s odd is that I feel I am reading a poet in translation, as if Simic composed the poems in his native language then translated them. The rhythm feels lax at times, and the cadence more like prose than poetry: “My brother said we should have called the doctor / and I was wondering / how to find his telephone number,” lines a touch too dull call poetry. His language isn't always as electric as a reader of poetry might crave, lacking subtleties of word play, and some of these poems are more narratively intentioned than lyrical, which raises a larger question for me .

We read fiction if it is a story we want to follow, and the characters are people we want to understand. One of the challenges facing the narrative poet (in these days of free verse domination) is convincing readers that one is actually reading a poem, and not prose. A contemporary lyric poet has a lot of tools at his or her disposal to cast their spell: ellipsis, metaphor, double entendres, leaps of reason, alliteration, rhythm (so on and so forth) to convince us there is a heightened awareness of language (which is as good a definition of poetry as any). Lyric poets have successfully done away with the need for metre in many, many instances. But if the objective of telling a story overrides these lyric tricks the reader wonders: is this poetry? Narrative poetry, traditionally, is considered to be poetry largely because of its meter. Narrative poetry without meter is in trouble. (One notable exception that I can think of is Charles Simic who writes successfully in a narrative voice.)

So this sets up the question: is Sunrise in the eyes of the Snowman primarily narrative or lyric? Both, probably. But I’m suggesting that where Simic is lyrical, his book works (and well), but where he is narrative, the book falters. On the lyric side, it is easy to find memorable lines. It is in fact packed with them: “their fingers kiss our skin the way spiders/kiss the strings of a guitar we left in the basement/and never learned to play;”and this: “We met on a hill of a summer night / where crickets played in the ashes / we used to call home.” I could quote lines this good from Sunrise.. until the poetic pastoral cows come home. And what’s more, it’s hard to imagine these lines coming from any other Canadian poet.

But where the book falls down is in its many wandering, heavily expository sentence constructions, and occasional adjectival overdoses:

“They no longer live among bright clouds...
No more does cupid sport with arrows,
no more are yesterday lover’s today's parents.
Angels live now among the greasy clouds
counting the disillusionments of tardy workers.” (Angels)

There’s nothing terribly wrong here; it simply drags, and this kind of descriptive mode is also fairly common throughout the book. If you like your poetic language to jump off the page and startle you into new recognition of old words, the above won’t do that . However, I look forward to Simic’s next English language output. I can potentially see his ability for surrealist image, and strong humanist content being condensed into a potent poetic formula.

His description of his intimacies with poetry can be found here: http://goransimic.com/essays.htm ( )