Struggling Times

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's new collection reflects sixty years as a leading figure in American letters.

Publishers Weekly

This is the Jamaica-born Simpson's 18th collection; its dry trimeters and tragic resignations should certainly please the faithful fans who have followed Simpson through six decades of acerbic prose and verse about existential resignation and middle-class malaise. Headline news, schadenfreude and the trials of old age are for Simpson just examples of the limits and pains endemic to all human life: in one poem Simpson says "that the things we care about/ are suddenly disappearing/ and that they always were." Yet the new poems, as much as any in his oeuvre, leave room for unexpected happiness: a brisk lyric celebrates the unconventional marriage of W.B. and Georgie Yeats. She took dictation from spirits, he wrote about ungovernable desires, "And if it wasn't love/ as love is in the movies,/ they didn't seem to mind." Many of his new poems raise themselves above the bitterness his earlier work could court. And yet he remains alert to evil, too, as when he writes of notoriously grisly, nightmarish paintings: "This angel was painted by Goya/ who doesn't believe in God." Simpson believes in endurance and the rewards of the ordinary. He can, at his best, make his readers believe in those things, too. (Apr.)

Educated at Munro College (Jamaica, West Indies) and at Columbia where he received his doctorate, Louis Simpson has taught at various universities. The author of seventeen books of poetry, he has received the Rome Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Hudson Review Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and the Pulitzer Prize.