Master of Disguises: Poems

By Charles Simic

“This 20th collection from the former U.S. poet laureate departs only by degrees from his poems of earlier decades—but it could just be his best book.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

In his first volume of poetry since his tenure as poet laureate, Charles Simic shows he is at the height of his poetic powers. These new poems mine the rich strain of inscrutability in ordinary life, until it is hard to know what is innocent and what ominous. There is something about his work that continues to be crystal clear and yet deeply weighted with violence and mystery. Reading it is like going undercover. The face of a girl carrying a white dress from the cleaners with her eyes half-closed. The Adam & Evie Tanning Salon at night. A sparrow on crutches. A rubber duck in a shooting gallery on a Sunday morning. And someone in a tree swing, too old to be swinging and to be wearing no clothes at all, blowing a toy trumpet at the sky.

“Simic’s compact poems carry concealed weapons amid unnerving juxtapositions . . . Simic’s edgy, brooding poems are like saxophone solos played under a bridge in the deep, dark hours of the spinning world’s bruising insomnia.” —Booklist

“In retrospect, the man who’s referred to himself as a ‘cheerful pessimist’ succeeds again in demonstrating his ability to condense meaning without obscuring it, to empower his poems with paradox, and to mesh seamlessly the real and imagined. And though many of the poems in Master of Disguises continue a style trend, they are also verbal tightropes off which a reader rarely falls, tightropes that demand—and deserve—a reader’s complete attention.” —Rattle

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9780547504537

Charles Simic

Charles Simic was a poet, essayist, and translator who was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. He published more than twenty books of poetry, in addition to a memoir and numerous books of translations for which he received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. In 2007, he served as poet laureate of the United States. He was a distinguished visiting writer at New York University and professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire, where he taught since 1973. He died in January 2023 at the age of eighty-four.

Book preview

title page

Contents

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Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

I

The Invisible One

Master of Disguises

Nineteen Thirty-eight

Scenes of the Old Life

The Elusive Something

Blind Man Feeding Pigeons

Preachers Warn

Worriers Anonymous

Scribbled in the Dark

Old Man

Among the Exiles

Wildflowers

Dogs Pity Their Masters

Nancy Jane

At Adam and Evie Tanning Salon

Dark Is the Night

II

Old Soldier

Carrying On Like a Crow

The Absent One

Driving Home

The Sparrow

Same-as-Ever

Father in Heaven

Sightseeing in the Capital

Daughters of Memory

Private Miseries

The End of a Parade

Our Salvation

Solitude

In That Big House

Puppet Maker

Sad as a Ship in a Bottle

Graveside Oration

III

Streets Paved with Gold

Darkened Chessboard

Double Feature

The Boardwalks Are Deserted

Little Boat, Take Care

Dead Season

Summer Storm

The Melon

The Lovers

Bright and Early

The Empress

In My Long Night

Trees in the Yard

The Toad

Summer Light

The Tree No One Visits

Keep This to Yourself

IV

The Invisible

V

And Who Are You, Sir?

About the Author

Copyright 2010 by Charles Simic

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Simic, Charles, date.

Master of disguises : poems / Charles Simic.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-39709-2

I. Title.

PS3569.I4725M37 2010

811’.54—dc22 2009047470

eISBN 978-0-547-50453-7

v2.0421

Some of these poems have previously appeared in the following magazines to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made: The New Yorker, Notre Dame Review, Margie, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry, Five Points, Boulevard, Times Literary Supplement, Daedalus, New Welsh Review, Paris Review, Tuesday