The Uncertain Certainty

Series

• Poets on Poetry

"In the beginning, always, a myth of origins of the poetic act. A longing to lower oneself one notch below language, to touch the bottom---that place of 'original action and desire,' to recover our mute existence, to re-create what is unspoken and enduring in words of the poem, and thus live twice as it were. Like our ancient ancestors who inhabited an animistic universe, the poet claims the interconnectedness and sentience of all things. This is what haunts: a world where magic is possible, where chance reigns, where metaphors have their supreme logic, where imagination is free and truthful."
---Charles Simic

The Uncertain Certainty provides a rich critical and autobiographical background against which we may view Charles Simic's major contributions to modern American poetry. Subjects covered in the collection range from Simic's recollections of his childhood in World War II Yugoslavia, his work as a translator, his interest in surrealism and other aspects of modernism, to the various issues that concern the poets of his generation.