SOURCE: “Joseph Cornell: Naked in Arcadia,” in The New Yorker, Vol. LXVIII, No. 44, December 21, 1992, pp. 130-34.

In the following excerpted review, Hirsch praises Simic's musings on the artist Joseph Cornell in Dime-Store Alchemy.

Charles Simic's new work of prose, Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell, is the most sustained literary response thus far to [Joseph] Cornell's boxes, montages, and films. It is a poet's book: incisive, freewheeling, dramatic—a mixture of evocation and observation, as lucid and shadowy as the imagination it celebrates. Simic wears his learning lightly. “I have a dream in which Joseph Cornell and I pass each other on the street,” he begins, and that sentence—that dream—sets the tone for what follows: a personal quest to approach Cornell through the urban milieu, to encounter and exalt his spirit. Simic writes, “Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five...