Poetry for a New Year : Wake-Up Call : HOTEL INSOMNIA, <i> By Charles Simic (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $18.95; 80 pp.)</i>

Surrounded by so many American poets who offer us peace through visions of universal oneness, or through agendas of wrongs that, once corrected, will make things well, or just through transcendent use of language, it’s also a comfort to know there is at least one poet out there who insists that nothing was, is or ever will be OK so long as we all shall live. The poems in Charles Simic’s “Hotel Insomnia” come from a vision of the world that, once experienced, prevents us from ever dozing again, that prevents us, for that matter, from feeling confidently awake.

Simic was born in what used to be Yugoslavia in 1938, and through all of his 15 books, it’s doubtful if there’s another poet writing in America with a greater sense of clarity of image or foreboding. He is the poet, not of the Great Chain of Being, but of the Food Chain, and of minnows, not of sharks. The opening poem of the book, “Evening Chess,” quoted here in its entirety, hangs above the reader throughout the entire volume:

The Black Queen raised high

In my father’s angry hand.

Notice that the poet here is the child, and the hand does not descend; nor, for that matter, does the sentence end. This is the poetry not of brutality but of the threat of brutality, its constant presence.

This assumption of a child’s role is, for both the poet and his reader, central to the book. It is Simic’s affinity to that part of himself that once was helpless (and still is) that informs his picture of the world. Even when a poem will begin with a scene of conventional pleasure--taking a walk at evening, or an evening at home, or a meal in the country--it leads in the end to lost children (“Evening Walk”), or a dead child and the endless mastication of time (“Romantic Sonnet”), or a nose bleed (“Country Lunch”).

There is a kind of “What Is Wrong With This Picture” feeling to these poems, and it’s only after we have decided that the answer to that question is “nothing,” and the picture has been bought, paid for, and is hanging on the wall over the sofa, that we see that small, disturbing image in one corner, the uneraseable horror that, as in life, we had so wanted to overlook.

And those are the optimistic openings! Frequently the warnings are there from the very beginnings. In “At The Vacancy Sign” the eye moves,

Past the butcher

With pig’s head in the

window

And the stray dog

At his keyhole

Past the sex shop.

Another poem, “The City,” begins, “At least one crucified at every corner” and “Street Scene” starts,

A blind little boy

With a paper sign

Pinned to his chest.

Too small to be

Begging alone,

But there he was.

The landscapes here, whether urban or rural, are a cross between De Chirico and Magritte--mostly deserted spaces with figures, if there are any, dwarfed by buildings or landscape, or, if there are no human figures present, then often there is just a single fly, our double. This is not a poetry of aggrandizement, but diminishment, not of power but its absence. Notice in the poem “War” (quoted in its entirety) that by the end we have shrunk.

The trembling finger of a woman

Goes down the list of casualties

On the evening of the first snow.

The house is cold and the list

is long.

All our names are included.

Notice also that this isn’t the stuff that rolls around our tongues like courage or hope. The language here is the language of a child’s reader, forcing us to assume a child’s vulnerable role. Simic is not a quotable poet, and certainly any situation where one would be tempted to quote him is long beyond saving, or even consolation. He gives us a world where neither author nor language will intercede, and what we are left with is terror and magic, and like his great predecessor, Vasko Popa, brings a peasant’s sense of the arbitrariness of the world.

“Hotel Insomnia” also contains several prose poems of the sort for which his 1989 book, “The World Doesn’t End,” received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (amid a rather large controversy where several major poets for several weeks wrote huffy letters to editors complaining, “It just isn’t verse”). Verse or not, the prose poems in this volume are even better, and unlike those prize-winning ones that often seemed arbitrary, these are elegant traps of the sort where animals who enter can move only forward but never back, to safety.

As you may have guessed, these mostly are not cheerful poems, and even when they are, they are not without a double message. In “Spring,” he spies a woman neighbor trying to hang her husband’s shirts on a line, but:

The morning wind made them

hard to pin.

It swept the dress so high above

her knees,

She had to stop what she was

doing

And have a good laugh, while

covering herself.

One last comment: Because Simic is a poet of primal simplicity, these poems, even more than most, need space. Because they are so short (the whole book could be read in under 30 minutes), this is a book to read only a poem or two at a time, and then put down until another time when the world looks maybe not half-bad. Then pick up “Hotel Insomnia” once again. It may not keep you happy, but it will keep you honest, and surely that’s a kind of happiness.