SOURCE: “Autobiography of the Present,” in Poetry, Vol. 125, No. 5, February, 1975, pp. 295-99.

In the following review, Atlas praises Simic's ability to condense great meaning into single images in Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk.

Charles Simic's second collection [Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk] draws on the practices of Surrealism, but his work owes more to East European poetry, with its emphasis on a condensed, sombre, even ballad-like language. Simic is a native of Yugoslavia, and has translated a number of poets from there, most notably Vasko Popa, with whom he has obvious affinities; his poems possess the same incantatory powers, the same cunning and story-telling art. Nor is there any falling-off from his first, much-praised volume, Dismantling the Silence, except for an occasional repetition of images; in some ways, this book seems even subtler in its modulations of the...