Louis Simpson's poems in Caviare at the Funeral are typically narrative; they are also typically brief, none going beyond a few pages. The poet hasn't made things easy for himself. Telling stories in verse is a demanding procedure because many of the features we appreciate in prose fiction—a sense of events spawning events, of characters developing or disintegrating, days passing into days—are seemingly at odds with the compactness of poetry. It has been often observed that poems relax in style as they grow in length. I would have expected that in composing such brief narratives Simpson's aim would be to avoid this stylistic dilution. But the style of the poems is, if not diluted, systematically understated. There is an odd mingling of effects, offering within tightly drawn boundaries a language that lacks the heightening which many poets would attempt to bring to such pieces.

Because the style is so determinedly unobstrusive the reader's attention focuses on content. The results vary. "New Lots" wanders randomly in and out of decades in the lives of an immigrant family transplanted from Russia to New York. The poet seems more concerned with evoking atmosphere and recording period detail than with rendering character or significant incident. This and some of the other poems employ the gestures of narrative without having, apparently, much of a story to convey. I found myself wondering: Shouldn't our past, rather than our nostalgia for it, be the chief object of interest?

In "Sway," a poem made up of memories of a summer friendship, far in the past, with a resort hotel waitress, the narrator recalls wryly his youthful ambition: "to write novels conveying the excitement / of life." The waitress herself, he tells us, went into an attempted novel…. It is not very exciting, as the speaker proceeds to admit with an admirable ingenuousness: "Then the trouble begins. I can never think of anything / to make the characters do." This is a blandly crafty apologia, in which the poet, by opting to beat the critic to the punch, exposes the most vulnerable aspect of his enterprise. I doubt whether any but a highly intelligent writer would be capable of imperiling a poem in this particular way, through such a sudden yet calculated eruption of self-consciousness.

Although I have found Simpson's aims and methods sometimes puzzling, I would not wish to say that the book is a bad one. There are examples in which the stance of the poet toward his material is not so much in question, and in such cases the poems are impressive. In "Working Late," the poet's memories of his lawyer father and of his own childhood in the West Indies are clearly on target…. "Caviare at the Funeral" and "Chocolates," based on Chekhov's life and writing, are poems which might have been mere versified anecdotes but which achieve a memorable tone, sad and probing, which approaches Chekhov's own. (If Simpson were as frequently effective in dealing with eventlessness as Chekhov is, my objections to some of his longer poems would be gladly abandoned.) "Typhus" is a quietly harrowing piece which the content is easily strong enough to carry; the dry, unemphatic presentation here seems absolutely right. Rhetoric would have ruined this piece drawn from a woman's memories of an epidemic she survived and the harsh childhood in old Russia which she survived into. It would be ill-served by anything but full quotation. Celebrating the unconscious heroism of one survivor, it remains in the mind as an emblem of human endurance. For poems such as this Simpson's book is well worth having. (pp. 171-73)