The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems, 1940-2001Few 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. |
Contents
An Old Building on Hudson Street | 24 |
The Listeners | 31 |
Inspiration | 37 |
Lilies of the Field | 43 |
In Country Houses | 49 |
Foursome | 55 |
Kaimana Beach | 61 |
Peters Dream | 65 |
The Country House | 210 |
The Climate of Paradise | 218 |
On a Disappearance of the Moon | 224 |
The Foggy Lane | 231 |
The PeatBog Man | 235 |
Dinner at the SeaView Inn | 242 |
The Hour of Feeling | 249 |
Searching for the Ox | 257 |
A Farewell to His Muse | 72 |
Homeless Men | 78 |
Driving | 84 |
At the Church Door | 91 |
POEMS 19401949 | 97 |
Carentan O Carentan | 103 |
As Birds Are Fitted to the Boughs | 109 |
The Man Who Married Magdalene | 111 |
Early in the Morning | 117 |
To the Western World | 124 |
Côte dAzur | 131 |
The Bird | 162 |
The Lovers Ghost | 168 |
In the Suburbs | 174 |
The Morning Light | 180 |
The Troika | 184 |
The Inner Part | 190 |
from SELECTED POEMS 1965 | 197 |
from ADVENTURES OF THE LETTER I 1971 | 203 |
The Street | 263 |
from CAVIAR AT THE FUNERAL 1980 | 269 |
American Classic | 277 |
The Old Graveyard at Hauppauge | 283 |
The Art of Storytelling | 290 |
Out of Season | 297 |
Physical Universe | 305 |
The Previous Tenant | 314 |
The Eleventh Commandment | 330 |
Ed | 337 |
from IN THE ROOM WE SHARE 1990 | 343 |
The People Next Door | 350 |
Sea of Grass | 357 |
Al and Beth | 364 |
The Believer | 370 |
The Walker on Main Street | 373 |
An Academic Story | 387 |
| 401 | |