In Goran Simic we have a modern problem: a major writer – Simic is one of the leading poets of his native Bosnia, which he escaped with his family in 1995 – working in the language of his country of exile. Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman is Simic’s fourth volume of poetry written in English, and it’s a deeply frustrating book.

Part of the problem is that much of this new collection is so good. Simic’s voice, chastened and sober and sonorous, is a welcome reprieve from what Patrick Warner has called “the school of Stacked Vowels and Clustered Consonants”: that fad of Pentecostal maximalism that Canadian poets imported from Hopkins and have made ubiquitous over the last 20 years. His handling of fable and allegory is expert. And the title poem is a master class in staging and image-making. 

But there are so many bizarre irritants in the collection, the most cloying being the pervasive use of cliché and stock poeticisms. Simic has speakers “spying through keyholes,” while the sun “kisses” the frost; he asks us to “listen to his silence” with the “night’s finger tapping at the door”; he gives us “morning light” and “the middle of the night” (at which time there is a “shadow that follows” him). These are no Muldoonian renovations; they’re just imaginative shorthand. Simic also offers some wacky, cringe-inducing lines on sex, as when a lover’s “palm slides further down toward her belly / to where the minefield begins” or when “he hugs her the way an octopus grips its victim” or when he “kisses her the way a temple kisses its pilgrim.” Add Simic’s misadventures with the rhyming quatrain – which almost always ring procrustean, padded, and pat – and one can only assume that something is being lost in self-translation.

hat being said, you can sense that Simic’s wrangling with the English language supplies some of the content for his poetry, a symbiosis I suspect will only deepen and strengthen in the years to come. But in this collection, Simic’s felicity for an adopted English is more Joseph Brodsky than Joseph Conrad, and therefore its merits – though they are many – are more documentary than literary.