For a days, at least, Charles Simic must be the happiest poet in America. Last Thursday, the Library of Congress announced that Mr. Simic, a 69-year-old who taught for decades at the University of New Hampshire, will be the next U.S. poet laureate. Later that day, the Academy of American Poets named Mr. Simic the winner of its Wallace Stevens Award, which carries a stipend of $100,000. To devoted readers of poetry, this harmonic convergence of honors came as no surprise. Mr. Simic has long been recognized as one of the best poets writing today; his past honors include a MacArthur Fellowship and a Pulitzer Prize, for his 1990 collection “The World Doesn’t End.”

But there is still something piquant about the idea of Mr. Simic serving in the anodyne, elder-statesman role of poet laureate. In recent years, the honor — it would be too much to call it an office — has usually gone to plain-speaking, affirmative poets such as Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, and Ted Kooser. All of them were perfectly suited to the ambassadorial role of laureate, and used it as a pulpit to spread the good word about poetry. Mr. Kooser launched a syndicated newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry”; Mr. Collins, whose easy comic verses are the poetic equivalent of bestsellers, edited two anthologies designed for schools; and Mr. Pinsky, the best poet laureate we’ve ever had, assiduously toured the country, appeared on television, and encouraged Americans to participate in his “Favorite Poem Project.”

Mr. Simic, however, is a different kind of poet from all these. 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.

It’s hard to imagine Mr. Simic as Yeats’s “smiling public man,” reading his poems to schoolchildren. Or, rather, it’s easy to imagine teenagers liking him, but hard to believe that the PTA would invite him, after reading a poem like “Note”:

A rat came on stage
During the performance
Of the school Christmas play.
Mary let out a scream
And dropped the infant
On Joseph’s foot …
Before proceeding to the wings
Where someone hit him,
In earnest,
Once, and then twice more,
With a heavy object.

This kind of black comedy is one of the elements that makes Mr. Simic’s poetry so appealing. Solemnity, in his hands, is always decomposing into absurdity; he has a genius for making us notice the ludicrous or disconcerting element in the most ordinary scenes. Yet he does this without winks or nudges, and he is never simply making a joke. Rather, his satire is quietly pervasive, a truly poetic way of experiencing the world, as you can see in “Solitude”:

There now, where the first crumb
Falls from the table
You think no one hears it
As it hits the floor,

But somewhere already
The ants are putting on
Their Quaker hats
And setting out to visit you.

There is a joke here — the ants in their Quaker hats — but there is also a metaphysical chill, of the kind found in different ways in Donne, or Poe, or Wislawa Szymborska. The casual accident — that overlooked crumb — instantly begins to spread its menacing ramifications; these ants are not just in search of food, they are looking for “you,” as though they have a message or a plan. Mr. Simic manages to evoke a whole dire cosmos, without ever using a word longer than two syllables.

Mr. Simic’s chilly juxtapositions can sometimes look like exercises in surrealism. But in his more autobiographical work, Mr. Simic makes clear that, in certain times and places, surrealism is simply realism.

The poet was born in Belgrade in 1938, just in time to witness the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, the ensuing partisan war, and the imposition of communist tyranny. His family emigrated in the early 1950s — “My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin,” he once told an interviewer — but the shadows of his early years are everywhere in Mr. Simic’s poetry. It is no wonder he writes poems with titles like “Misfortune Is on the Way,” “Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators,” and “A Suitcase Strapped With a Rope”:

They made themselves so tiny
They could all fit in one suitcase …
Soon the border guards were going
To open it and inspect it,
Unless, of course, it was a burglar
And he knew another way to go.

Dream, parable, and autobiography are superimposed until they become a whole new kind of experience — a Charles Simic poem. “This is a tale with a kernel,” he wrote in an early work, “You’ll have to use your own teeth to crack it.” Over the years, as he has gotten older and more respected, Mr. Simic’s style has gotten easier to chew, more at ease with the world and its pleasures.

To see him at his best, start with his “Selected Early Poems” (George Braziller, 255 pages, $14.95), along with his memoir, “A Fly in the Soup” (University of Michigan Press, 200 pages, $17.95). These books offer Mr. Simic’s dark illuminations and acrid comedy in their most concentrated form — the qualities that make him not a mere laureate, but a genuine poet.