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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: #1070215 in Books
- Published on: 2003-09-01
- Original language: English
- 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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
Customer Reviews
This poet was diasporic, wry, and mongrel when he jumped out
from the womb of Jamaica into the tomb of Wheeler Hall but he kept on writing, and thinking in writing, and deforming the narrative poem into a wry little lyric full of pithy sense and twisted ironice morals. I have loved his work a along time, and the man is part of the whole thing, what Wallace Stevens praised as "The Whole Man" composed of his time and climate and place, and nation-language which by now is not the Caribbean but Bush II America. I would honor him with a Pulitizer Prize if I could,this lyric machine still writing at 80, still the same imagistic wit and focus. The Hawaii poems are pretty interestingk even when they are remote, sarcastic, and tourist-sardonic like some haole moon peaking out over Kaimana Beach. But yes I agree that "Particularly now, when experimental schools such as the Language group command critical attention, his poetry can seem old-fashioned. It might best be considered as a model of academic poetry today" as Ivan Arguelles put it in 1988 for the Univ. of California at Berkeley Library. Yes, it is godawfully "old fashioned," and brilliant and animating by turns, twisted like Thomas Hardy and Noel Coward in one: Maybe, "By 50, he understood the Way of Heaven" as Confucius said long ago and far away. Praise him...he keeps writing in his own way & time.
The Owner of the House
Louis Simpson is an American treasure. His poetry is honest, yet
mysterious - plain-spoken, yet artful. This collection offers not only those poems which have long garnered him our highest accolades, but also new poems which reveal an owner of the house who is very much at home. What a rare invitation this collection is - an open door to an open heart! A large heart.
An expansive mind. A rare talent.
The Owner of the House by Louis Simpson
This work contains many themes about life, pogroms, immigrants,
the homeless and occasionally theology. Here are some samples.
"To the north (Mauka)
a mass of rosy clouds
two slopes of a mountain
sprinkled with garden lights. (Kaimana Beach)
or
"Beside a Church we dug our holes,
By tombstone and by cross
They were too shallow for our souls
When the ground began to toss. "
The readings make for an entertaining session. This poetry
is light-hearted but it is not elegant in the style of
an Evangeline or Edgar Allen Poe work.
