Many years ago in my reading I was shopping for a good contemporary lyric poet. I had trouble finding what I was looking for until a friend recommended the poems of Louis Simpson. "The best we've got," he said. People Live Here includes more than 100 poems from the author's ten previous books and chapbooks, and from recent uncollected poems. Also included is an afterword by Simpson himself, "The Sake of Words for Their Own Sake."

This latter piece consists of a charming and honest description of Simpson's Jamaican childhood ("I am the other Jamaican, a child of the middle class, some of us white, some 'colored,' but all of us borrowing our manners and prejudices from the English"), his early inspiration to become a writer ("the stories my mother read to me"), his education and war experience, his political awakening and what he was reading at various times. Readers will be touched by the ease and good humor with which Simpson examines Simpson. An example of that humor occurs when he mentions his discovery of A. E. Housman: "… for a year or two [I] read his lyrics with the kind of sympathy that a young American now feels for rock."

The poems, too, should shake a lot of napping readers awake. The thematic continuity spanning the thirty-four years covered here is remarkable. Simpson has always focused on physical and spiritual love, reconciling the present with the past via the family, man's inhumanity to his fellow man, war, and spiritual poverty.

The book's first two sections display traditional, and beautiful, lyrics; Section Two contains poems inspired by his war years. These are some of the most powerful anti-war poems of our time. "The Heroes" is an example of this…. (p. 119)

Section Three chronicles the poet's relocation to America. A significant thread here is an ongoing debate with the spirit of Whitman. Having absorbed the latter, Simpson arrives with great expectations only to find himself striding, lonely, through a land "where malls are our churches."

"Modern Lives," the fourth section, is the most cantankerous and didactic expression of Simpson's social criticism. The poet settles into suburbia with its prefab specters and infidelities and bears a collective suffering.

Section Five explores his mother's (and his own) eastern European roots. Here is a fascinating contrast with Section Three, for Chekhov supplants Whitman as the narrator's aggressively remote foil.

"Armidale," the shortest section in the book, takes as its impetus an Australian journey, which inspires a number of weighty assertions concerning our misuse of nature, our misuse of ourselves.

The final section, "Recapitulations," recombines these various byways and offers a fitting coda.

Another offering, The Best Hour of the Night, proves that Louis Simpson's work and development, luckily for us, continues. Here the poet adds to his canon of poems about contemporary life by employing deft recombinations of, primarily, historical and mimetic impulses. In addition, he reminds us again that laughter can work in a poem and even be necessary. In "Physical Universe" a man comes downstairs at 5 A.M. and pours a cup of coffee. Finding his son's science text on the table, he begins to read. The text triggers a meditation on our civilization, on the fact that we find ourselves at-and-away-from home in it. The meditation comes full circle, back to the present day—"Tuesday, the day they pick up the garbage! / He leapt into action." This witty transition sets up the return to bed and one of the most tender moments I've seen in recent poetry. (pp. 119-20)

In ["The Previous Tenant"] the central character, sometimes detached, sometimes obsessed, pieces together the story of his predecessor. That fellow, a doctor, ruined his position by engaging in an ill-advised affair. Though he actually appears only once, in the poem's eighth section (to retrieve sullenly some of his belongings), we feel that we know him all too well by poem's end. And worse, we feel that we know the community's upstanding snobs who hounded him, too. Simpson's surgical social commentary is as devastating as ever…. Louis Simpson makes our collective fear beautiful, and helps us to believe that we can manage it. (p. 121)