Finalists for the 1992-1993 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes : POETRY

HOTEL INSOMNIA by Charles Simic (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). The haunt of distant East European memory mingles with present nocturnal desolation in these poems to create a sleepless awareness of life's arbitrariness and terror. Sleepwalking in "the same old city, the same old street," wee-hours' sounds from a seedy hotel where "A few evenings a month/A crippled old man came to play "My Blue Heaven" are repetitive refrains that Simic, who won the Pulitzer Prize for "The World Doesn't End," cannot abandon because there is such a need to remember: "The trembling finger of a woman/Goes down the list of casualties/On the evening of the first snow./The house is cold and the list is long./All our names are included."