Most people will

tell you that there’s no single, unifying “style“ in contemporary American poetry; instead, conventional wisdom has it that our verse exists in a variety of forms and voices as dazzlingly individual as snowflakes or Baptist churches. Whether this is actually the case — whether, 200 years from now, our descendants will leaf through dusty poetry anthologies and say, “My, how different they all sound!“ — is debatable; what is not so debatable is that very, very few American poets sound anything like Charles Simic. …
Simic is often described as a surrealist, and to the extent surrealism depends on phantasmagoria, the shoe may fit. But if so, he’s a surrealist with a purpose: the disconcerting shifts and sinister imagery that characterize his work are always intended to suggest — however obliquely — the existential questions that trouble our day-to-day lives. / David Orr, NYT *) 5.4.03