With Classic Ballroom Dances, Simic's eighth book of poetry, he hit his best stride. Better than Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk, better than Charon's Cosmology, better even than his Pulitzer Prize-winning The World Doesn't End, Classic Ballroom Dances may, in fact, be the finest single book of poetry released in the twentieth century in the English language. It certainly stands on a short shelf with The World Doesn't End, Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems, Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle, the Collected Poems of Aime Cesaire, etc.