Fungible Convictions

To describe Charles Simic as a master of suspense would be misleading, given the cliché refers to a genre rather than a technique available to all writers. But that’s what he is. Simic, throughout his long, pleasantly varied career as a poet, memoirist, essayist, and critic, has always found a way to foreshadow his themes while always delaying the author-reader joint epiphany until the very last moment. Even when you know it’s coming, you’re still surprised.

In his new collection of poems of mixed success called My Noiseless Entourage, Simic can still surprise. I’ve long had my own projection of him as someone both avuncular and too-experienced, and now an image I keep of him is him, his hands cupped one over the other, offering something still-hidden, something I’m scared will be either too beautiful or really quite nasty. Consider this poem, “The Gamblers Upstairs,” from the first section of My Noiseless Entourage:

The faint rattle of dice rolling
Late at night
No one else hears—

They are wagering over me, placing bets,

The high rollers and their sidekicks
On their knees.
Little Joe from Baltimore,
Ada from Decatur.

The noise of bones,
The hush after each roll
Keeping me awake—
God’s throw or devil’s?

My love holding her hands over my eyes
As we inch toward the stairs
Stripped down to our underwear
And liable to slip and break our necks.

Now, you know where that poem is heading. A narrator not falling asleep; invisible characters—bewildering forces—somewhere above. “God’s throw or devil’s?” arrives as welcome and punctual as an overnight train. But Simic’s trademark is in the unveilings of last stanzas, in this case the introduction of a lovely liaison between the lower room and upper (completing the perhaps unintentional Orthodox triptych of festal suite, bridal chamber, and afterlife) and the undercutting humor of breaking one’s neck as people above gamble on fate. It’s as though, to borrow that freshman comp crutch, the case is being presented in the early stanzas but the proper frame arrives only at the very last. The same things happen in Simic’s 1996 collection Walking the Black Cat, the poems ending with winners like “My shoes need laces / My pants need your finger to hold them up,” or children, “their faces demonic,” running around the blaze of an autumn leaf-burn.

My Noiseless Entourage I wouldn’t place at the top of Simic’s work. But that doesn’t matter, as each of the cleanly-styled motley-topicked poems betters most anything else you’ll read by poets today. His poems are still, as always, populated by gamblers, black cats, bums, sidelong naivete, and angrifyingly observant imagery. Simic’s felicity with imagery native to cities, farms, Yugoslavia, Manhattan—well, anyone, writer or not, would be jealous to have such a stash.

But he’s most at home in this collection with the language of death, as something both feared and intriguing. There “Absentee Landlord”—

The least he could do is put up a sign:
AWAY ON BUSINESS
So we could see it
In the graveyard where he collects the rent

—and death-knowledge-pilfering in “Sweetest”—

Little candy in death’s candy shop
I gave your sugar a lick
When no one was looking,
Took you for a ride on my tongue
To all the secret places,

Trying to appear above suspicion
As I went about inspecting the confectionary,
Greeting the owner with a nod
With you safely tucked away
And melting to nothing in my mouth.

—and these lines from “To Fate”: “And me already like an old piano / Dangling out of a window at the end of a rope.” And these from “Slurred Words”: “I was just one more crow / Trailing after the pallbearers.” Mortality is the connecting filament in this collection. But even eerifying poems like the title piece finish up with a surprise, a centripetal couple of lines to spin the reader out of the page and into their own lives.

We were never formally introduced
I had no idea of their number.
It was like a discreet entourage
Of homegrown angels and demons
All of whom I had met before
And had since largely forgotten.

In time of danger, they made themselves scarce.
Where did they all vanish to?
I asked some felon one night
While he held a knife to my throat,
But he was spooked too,
Letting me go without a word.

It was disconcerting, downright frightening
To be reminded of one’s solitude,
Like opening a children’s book—
With nothing better to do—reading about stars,
How they can afford to spend centuries
Traveling our way on a glint of light.

How Simic dances from felons to children’s books—and you can see it right there!—I can’t explain. But he pulls it off, and it’s jarring in its subtlety. It affirms Simic’s talent and makes My Noiseless Entourage one of those rare books: a contemporary poetry collection you’d actually pay money to have.

64 pages | $22- | Harcourt | April, 2005