Charles Simic, the United States’ new poet laureate, is unlike his predecessors. “There is nothing of the Midwest or the Popular Front about his work, which is sponsored mainly by foreign literatures. He draws on the dark satire of Central Europe, the sensual rhapsody of Latin America, and the fraught juxtapositions of French Surrealism, to create a style like nothing else in American literature. Yet Mr. Simic’s verse remains recognizably American — not just in its grainy, hard-boiled textures, straight out of 1940s film noir, but in the very confidence of its eclecticism.”