From the Stacks is a regular series on the Poetry Center Blog in which we solicit authors to wander our library and choose books that have been important to them and/or that they recommend.

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist and translator. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. His first poems were published in 1959, when he was twenty-one. Since 1967, he has published numerous books of his own poetry, eight books of essays, a memoir, and many of books of translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry for which he has received literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship and Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. Simic is an Emeritus Professor at the University of New Hampshire where he has taught American Literature and Creative Writing since 1973 and the Distinguished Visiting Poet at New York University where he teaches every fall semester. Since 1999 he has been a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. Simic was the Poet Laureate of the United States 2007-2008 Scribbled in the Dark, his new volume of poetry, and The Life of Images, a book of his selected prose are his most recent publications.

 

Charles's selections From the Stacks are:

Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

Last Poems by Paul Celan

Remembering Poets by Donald Hall

Garbage by A.R. Ammons

The Dream Songs by John Berryman

The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov by Denise Levertov

Selected Poems by James Tate

The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo by César Vallejo

Blue Laws by Kevin Young

Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984 edited by David Ball