Jackstraws

Simic's poems are like self-developing polaroids, in which a scene, gradually assembling itself out of unexplained images, suddenly clicks into a recognisable whole. Because of his wartime youth, Simic's mind is stocked with precise images of the fearful, the incomprehensible and the fragmented. Two motives - the search for explanation, knowing there is none and the finding of plots or images to match the burden of feeling - have always driven his poems. The results in Jackstraws are as brutal and featherlight as they have ever been.