With almost every volume of collected poems the question arises: Are we to read it from front to back or from back to front? That is, should the poet's completed opus be assessed from the perspective of its mature and final achievement or from the first careless rapture of its earliest aspiration? The Collected Poems of Louis Simpson, it can be safely said, are climactic. There are some indubitable successes scored in the quarter of a century between 1940 and 1963, but the volume gathers strength only in the quarter of a century that follows. The lyrical ballast is jettisoned; echo diminished; rhyme abandoned; a persona, and a personal poetics, developed. With impish detachment he salutes the presiding genius of the mid-century:

O amiable prospect!
O kingdom of heaven on earth!
I saw Mr. Eliot leaning over a fence
Like a cheerful embalmer,

while irrevocably drawn to Walt Whitman's omnivorous “stomach that can digest / Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems” without himself being absorbed.

A turning point was the celebrated and much anthologized “On the Lawn at the Villa”:

On the lawn at the villa—
That's the way to start, eh, reader?
We know where we stand—somewhere expensive—
You and I imperturbes, as Walt would say,
Before the diversions of wealth, you and I engagés.
On the lawn at the villa
Sat a manufacturer of explosives,
His wife from Paris,
And a young man named Bruno …

Here, in embryo, are many of Simpson's subsequent rhetorical tactics: the conversational address, as if at a public reading; the sly, personal disengagement; the mysterious drama (itself explosive, capable of infinite expansion) distilled to a vignette. The narrative theme would in time balloon beyond such précis, but the irony at the heart of the text (“Perhaps, after all, this is not the right subject for a poem”) would continue to sound. What then is “the right subject”? That was the nagging question.

It may be that he first formulated this question—and this quest—in discovering his Russian-Jewish relations as an adolescent in New York. Growing up with his father in Jamaica, he had had no suspicion that he might be half-Jewish. It was his mother's reminiscences of Odessa and family talk of Meyer and Isidor, Adam Yankev and Baruch, and “Avram the cello-mender, / the only Jewish sergeant / in the army of the Tsar”—wholly wonderful and disorienting to an English, colonial lad—that must have first jogged him to an awareness of the disorienting otherness of his most familiar-seeming acquaintances. In literary terms, it was his discovery of Chekhov. Some fine poems, “Chocolates,” for example, are wholly devoted to Chekhov. But his influence runs far deeper than that; he was to become the recurrent presence and inspiration of all Simpson's poetry in its humor and pathos, its circumstantial concision and narrative drive. As Simpson himself put it: “I have tried to bring into poetry the sense of life, the gestures that Chekhov got in prose. And I have tried to bring in humor. I do not believe that this is common; there is plenty of satire, but this is not what I mean by humor” (“Rolling Up,” 1976). Chekhov remained the touchstone and the American became an apt mimic of his master's voice:

They were lovers of reading in the family.
For instance, Cousin Deborah
who, they said, had read everything …
The question was, which would she marry,
Tolstoy or Lermontov or Pushkin?

His imagination had already been marked—or permanently branded, rather—by his experience of battling as an infantryman across France and Holland in the Second World War. That and the nervous breakdown, with attendant amnesia, which followed: “Before the war I had written a few poems and some prose. Now I found that poetry was the only kind of writing in which I could express my thoughts. Through poems I could release the irrational, grotesque images I had accumulated during the war; and imposing order on these images enabled me to recover my identity” (“Dogface Poetics,” 1965). War poems surface throughout his working career. That ordeal was as decisive for Simpson, who survived his war, as for Wilfred Owen, who died in his. Not so much as a subject, primarily as an attitude to writing: “words to me were pale in comparison with experience,” he recently wrote in The King My Father's Wreck, “mattered only in so far as they transmitted experience.” That is why he has resolutely set his face against theorists who argue “that there is no direct connection between words and life.” That, too, is why he nurses a grudge against W. H. Auden for pretending that poetry was “fundamentally frivolous.” The frivolity of poetry, if that is the word, resides only in its ultimate helplessness in the face of horror. What the miracle of spontaneous life demands of poets is truth. Simpson articulated his ars poetica early on: “Ideas were only so many words, they had nothing to do with reality … a man spilling his intestines in the road.” Or as he put it in his only novel, Riverside Drive (1962): “But I, by a quirk of chance, belong with those whose task it is to describe the surface of things, to record the gestures of men and women. If I must, then so be it—but I will speak only with reluctance. I will resist any expression that is not the truth. And, rather than say what is not true, I will be silent.” His is a soldier's testament:

That is why some men, when they think about war, fall silent. Language seems to falsify physical life and to betray those who have experienced it absolutely—the dead. As Hemingway remarked, to such men the names on a map are more significant than works of imagination …

Like other men of the war generation, I began with middle age; youth came later. Nowadays in my poems I try to generate mystery and excitement: I have even dealt in general ideas. But I retain the dogface's suspicion of the officer class, with their abstract language and indifference to individual, human suffering. You might say that the war made me a footsoldier for the rest of my life.

Here is another reason perhaps for reading his Collected Poems backwards. Simpson concludes that testament, his contribution to The Poetry of War (ed. Ian Hamilton, 1965):

Now I see that I was writing a memorial of those years for the men I had known, who were silent. I was trying to write poems that I would not be ashamed to have them read—poems that would be, in their laconic and simple manner, tolerable to men who had seen a good deal of combat and had no illusions.

Thus no magic, no suppressed secrets, no bardic intonations. No pathos, no attitudinizing, no heart-on-the-sleeve revelations. Only the barebones of daily existence, an anecdotal essence, are allowed to survive “a life beginning with ‘Hi!’ and ending with ‘So long!.’” The poetic ideals could be summed up as: a “Muse install'd amid the kitchenware” (Whitman); “The natural object is always the adequate symbol” (Pound); “those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses” (Williams), blessed by that “saint of the quotidian / himself, Leopold Bloom.” “To write poetry,” he concluded, “one has to be at a distance from one's feelings and be able to play with the facts.”

The first step, therefore, was to get my controlling mind out of the poem and treat the subject impersonally. So I embodied my ideas in a narrative—there would be a character to do the observing, and one or two others.

(from “The Terms of Life Itself: Writing ‘Quiet Desperation,’” 1985)

He adopted the pseudonym “Peter” as alter ego to detach the merely autobiographical, while remaining “both in and out of the game.”

The problem of poetry, then, became the problem of narrative poetry in the most commonplace circumstances. “How to Live on Long Island,” for example:

There's no way out.
You were born to waste your life.
You were born to this middleclass life
As others before you
Were born to walk in procession
To the temple, singing.

(“In the Suburbs”)

As if Louis Simpson had been called to become the poet of suburbia, or exurbia, at any rate small-town America where “lines of little colored flags” advertise “Foreign Motor Sales” and the shopping mall “is laid out like a cathedral”:

I am taking part in a great experiment—
whether writers can live peacefully in the suburbs
and not be bored to death.

Far from being bored to death, he has flourished on the Long Island shore among his querulous and quirky neighbours. The experiment consisted of seeing whether he could make them sing; or, if not sing exactly, at least resound without grace notes or frills, devoid of image or metaphor even. For where he lives “there are no legends, only gossip”:

As I said, lots of stories,
and some strange ones. But few occasions
for song, as far as I know.

A transformation of some kind is what he seems ultimately to be after. But he knows there is no standing on tiptoe to grab it. It has to be patiently and unpretentiously and quizzically accumulated:

Wordsworth said that the passions
of people who live in the country
are incorporated with the beautiful
and permanent forms of nature.
In the suburbs they are incorporated
with the things you see from the train …

Methodically, then, without a hint of cuteness or nudging send-up, Simpson has turned himself into the pop laureate of commuterland. “An Affair in the Country” is a mature example:

As he lived on East 82nd Street
and she in Wappingers Falls
he saw more of the road than of her:
Kaufman Carpet
Outlook Realty
Scelfo Realty Amoco Color TV
Now and then there would be something out of the ordinary:
X-Rated Dancer
Fabric Gardens Discount Dog Food
They would meet for a couple of hours
at the Holiday Inn. Then she would have to leave,
and he had to start back.
Speed Zone Ahead
Signal Ahead
Road Narrows
Bridge Out
Yield

This is like a revved up version of e.e. cummings, but without any of his tricks and trills. It is as if John Cheever or John Updike had been reduced to their ultimate essence. Or, better still, Raymond Carver recuperated for verse. The poetry is all in the concision, the antithetical swing of fragments. He risks verging on the commonplace, it strikes me, when the theme of adultery is extended, as in “The Previous Tenant,” to a fourteen-page novelette. Whatever the length, however, Simpson has perfected the very style he had once mocked as that of Mr. Eliot the “cheerful embalmer”:

O City of God!
Let us be thoroughly dry.
Let us sing a new song unto the Lord,
A song of exclusion.
For it is not so much a matter of being chosen
As of not being excluded.
I will sing unto the Lord
In a voice that is cheerfully dry.

It was T. E. Hulme who had prophesied that “the particular verse we are going to get will be cheerful, dry and sophisticated.” Which Simpson turned into his own distinctive, acid-free type of dry-point engraving:

What do definitions and divorce-court proceedings
have to do with the breathless reality?
O little lamp at the bedside
with views of Venice and the Bay of Naples,
you understood! Lactona toothbrush
and suitcase bought in a hurry,
you were the witnesses of the love
we made in bed together.
Schraffi's Chocolate Cherries, surely you remember
when she said she'd be true forever,
and, watching “Dark Storm,” we decided
there is something to be said, after all,
for soap opera, “if it makes people happy.”

Born in the Caribbean, the product of a very British education, Simpson on Long Island still feels permanently estranged. “Sometimes when I look at Main Street,” he recorded, “I feel like a stranger looking at the Via Aurelia, or the Pyramids” (1962). More recently: “to this day I have retained that sense of difference and excitement. I am still a stranger in America” (1995). But estrangement has not turned him into an exotic poet, a kind of British Martian. Since dropping the ballad form, decades ago, nothing British clings to him at all—not even when venturing on Larkin's territory, as in “The Boarder” say, or crossing Heaney's tracks, as in “The Peat-Bog Man.” His life studies may suggest the example of Lowell, but all such comparisons are inept. He has become sui generis, moving gracefully from memoirs in prose to memorials in verse:

The poetry of life …
how impossible it seems!
Wouldn't it be nice to be mindless
and just write, like a “language poet.”

Unlike such “mindless” poets, however, he welcomes “life.” He welcomes the paradox that “the object of writing is to make words disappear.” Or if not quite disappear, become fitfully transparent. His ideal is age-old as Chaucer (invoked in There You Are):

Speketh so pleyn at this time, we yow preye,
That we may understonde what ye seye.