The Book of Gods and Devils

"A loopy pilgrimage from a haunted past into a hopped-up, mad new world" from the Pulitzer Prize winner and former US poet laureate (Newsday). Loneliness, loss, sadness, and mystery mark this wonderful volume of forty-nine poems by Charles Simic, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The World Doesn't End and praised as "one of the truly imaginative writers of our time" by the Los Angeles Times. "A Charles Simic poem starts with a sentence fragment, an ungainly image crash-landing at the feet of a speaker who was expecting something else entirely . . . There is a Central European sensibility at work in his poems." --The New York Times Book Review "Simic is adept at runic inscriptions, fragments of dislodged civilizations, the shards of universal disjunction, and poignant ruin." --The Washington Post "The quality of Simic's poems has grown steadily over the past two decades, despite a MacArthur 'genius' award and last year's Pulitzer. Such prizes seem piteously small next to the large beauties of his work." --Harvard Book Review "Fifty poems of inimitable grace and beauty." --Publishers Weekly "He touches the reader with an aching impact." --The Litchfield County Times… (more)