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“... The Preacher Says Regiments of the damned, halt! So, we turned to take a better look At the spread eagle on the sidewalk. There he was, hair combed over his eyes. Abominations, he called after us, Everything crummy and screwed up since Adam Is thanks to you! Let’s see you turn water into wine! Let’s see you get down on your knees and pray!      * You are nothing but a lightning bug The night flicks off its sleeve! An abandoned movie lot in the desert With its windows broken ...”

“... in a field across the road. ‘Can I go and watch?’ I asked my mother, God forgive me. Père Simic’s advice: treat yourself, son. Drink a good bottle of cheap wine. ‘I had a bellyful of your love,’ a man shouts into a cellphone as he passes me on the street. A life of vice starts in the cradle. I loved crawling under the skirts of my mother’s ...”

“... Oh those awful Serbs! Until recently no one cared or knew much about them in the West and now almost everyone has an opinion about them and it’s most likely to be unfavourable. Karadzic and Mladic – icons of inhumanity – are taken as embodiments of the soul of their people. Even before the wars in the former Yugoslavia started, American newspapers are offering analyses of the Serbs ...”

“... Only someone badly lost would find himself driving through a village as unremarkable as this, I’m thinking. The lights are on in the post office, but the parking lot is empty: no one, I imagine, is in a hurry to pick up their mail when it consists, mostly, of bills. The two-storey elementary school is quiet: it’s as if they’re waiting to hear the answer to some question the teacher has posed and it’s been a long time coming ...”

“... It may well be that the most interesting literature of this century cannot be subsumed under the broad label of Modernism or be said to have originated in the great literary centres, but was actually the work of outsiders and mavericks, starting with Kafka, who created something without precedent from a mix of native and foreign traditions. The poetry of Vasko Popa, who died in 1991, is of that eccentric company ...”

“... Purgatory We never even felt our share of the eternal in what was our life: the moments from which these bursts of activity and lethargy are made up, the similarity between here and there in inner and outer space. We exchanged life for its semblance, the object for its shadow, the visible coin for the invisible riches whose origins are unknown and whose value is ambiguous: the body for a wee spirit, the residue of this creation out of nothing, as in a diaphanous box ...”

“... He was a poet of a lost world. A hundred years ago, there were still Greek communities along the coast of the Mediterranean, in Asia Minor and in South-East Europe that have since dispersed or died out. I know a little about them since part of my family, on my mother’s side, are descendants of Greek merchants who were permitted to settle in Belgrade by the Ottomans in the late 18th century; they prospered, became wealthy and over time intermarried with Serbs and lost their ethnic distinctness ...”

“... who is ideally placed to traffic between the land of her birth and her adopted homeland, the way Charles Simic has done since the 1960s with Serbia (see his anthology of Serbian poetry, The Horse Has Six Legs, and his numerous single volumes of Lalic, Tadic, Ristovic, Salamun and many more). I wish her patience, talented originals, and many ...”

“... as the stuff of life. Where Ammons’s inclinations tend towards the epic and the all-inclusive, Charles Simic is an avowed miniaturist. This has guaranteed him a more sympathetic reading than Ammons in an England still under the sway of the lyric. Simic is also, significantly, a rather more sentimental poet, his ...”

“... of them with her calm, uncreased prose – John Ashbery, James Merrill, A.R. Ammons, Amy Clampitt, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Seamus Heaney, Louise Glück, Jorie Graham and Rita Dove. Vendler is in love with the lyric, indeed so in love with it that she befriends strangers who appear to resemble it: in her collection of review-essays, Soul Says, she ...”

“... have ended. But it would have begun in Romania, where he was born in 1914. In his introduction Charles Simic says of Steinberg: The reason we understood each other perfectly was that we were both reared in what he called ‘the Turkish delight manner’. I knew exactly what he meant. When I was growing up in Belgrade, our homes combined Western-style ...”

“... foundation for what is going to be a very long struggle’. The struggle has been long already. Charles Glass Jerusalem Because I live ten blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, my response to the events of 11 September is intensely localised; but because I was a thousand miles away in a foreign country when the events occurred, my experience of ...”

“... of the Hudson. In New York, Oppen met Louis Zukofsky, who had already been published by Pound, and Charles Reznikoff, an attorney at work on a law encyclopedia. The three poets, grown uneasy with Imagism and keen to distinguish themselves, conceived a publishing venture which was very much in the Oppens’ mind when they took off for Europe in 1929. They ...”