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The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001
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Product Description
Few poets have so artfully confronted American life as Louis Simpson. Persona speakers struggle with everyday issues against a backdrop of larger forces, the individual’s maladjustment to a culture of materialism and brutal competition, the failure of marriage under the pressures of such a society, the failure of the American dream. Simpson wages a lover’s quarrel with the world.
"Louis Simpson has perfect pitch. His poems win us first by their drama, their ways of voicing our ways . . . of making do with our lives. Then his intelligence cajoles us to the brink of a cliff of solitude and we step over into the buoyant element of true poetry."—Seamus Heaney
Educated at Munro College (West Indies) and at Columbia University, Louis Simpson has taught widely, most recently at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry and ten works of prose. He has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the Hudson Review , the Guggenheim Foundation, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1781129 in Books
- Published on: 2003-09-01
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: .85" h x 5.98" w x 9.00" l, 1.17 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 416 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Simpson is one of the most memorable contributors to the outstanding Poets of World War II [BKL Mr 15 03]. His war experiences in the infantry in Europe were hairier than those of most American soldier-poets, who flew or served away from the front. The war preoccupies his early work, which includes most of his most impressive poems. Those, regular in rhyme and meter, often achieve their edgy power by balancing grim content against the plucky mood of their jingly rhythms. After the war, Simpson became a literature professor without forsaking his public voice and concerns. Switching to unrhymed, even-lined verse, he wrote of gray comforts and desperate strivings (often just so much adultery) in the suburbs; of travel and travel observations; and of his Russian Jewish heritage, which somehow led to his own upbringing in Jamaica while too many relatives went to Auschwitz. Read chronologically, his poems constitute the record of a finely intelligent and democratic man's journey from heroism to warm, common citizenship--a life one can envy. Ray Olson
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