The Second World War was in a sense America's first. How would their soldier-poets write about it? Randall Jarrell, who didn't go to the war but who had read Owen and Sassoon, took an expected route. The waste of war, the pity of war: these themes produced such classics as ‘Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner,’ ‘Eighth Air-Force’ and ‘Pilots Man Your Planes.’ For Louis Simpson it was very different. He fought across Europe, from Normandy to Germany. ‘During the war I felt there was an intelligence watching and listening,’ he says in an endnote to this selection of his poems. It is not a remark that you could imagine coming from Owen, or from Jarrell, and it goes much of the way towards explaining why Simpson's war poems are so different from theirs. Their characteristic response to war is shocked sorrow at the hideousness of things; Simpson's is frequently awed wonder. He is the Yankee a long way from home, an innocent moving through an almost magically charged landscape, fearful but curious, astray but not lost in a haunted wood. And so he writes his great ballad, ‘Carentan O Carentan,’ [in People Live Here] about the fall of innocence into the experience of war which is also about the American dream of Europe:

Trees in the old days used to stand
And shape a shady lane
Where lovers wandered hand in hand
Who came from Carentan.
This was the shining green canal
Where we came two by two
Walking at combat interval.
Such trees we never knew …

Awed wonder is also there in ‘The Battle,’ which ends: ‘Most clearly of that battle I remember / The tiredness in eyes, how hands looked thin / Around a cigarette, and the bright number / Would pulse with all the life there was within.’ It's an almost Dante-like vision of a hand of men in a far, dark world of war, presences glimpsed through the tight focus of a paint of light. Simpson has a number of other poems about the war which are almost as fine, and to them should be added a masterly short lyric, ‘The Silent Generation,’ which is about the ‘enthusiasm’ (the poem's leitmotif) with which his generation put down Hitler, and then lost its way.

We lack enthusiasm.
Life seems a mystery;
It's like the play a lady
Told me about: ‘It's not …
It doesn't have a plot,’
she said, ‘it's history.’

Can you really believe an intelligence is present in a world where life is plotless? Just about. For Simpson is really an ironic fatalist. What is going to happen will happen no matter how much we construct or plan for alternatives. And so he re-reads Whitman, as all American poets must, and that great poet tells him: ‘I gave no prescriptions, / And those who have taken my moods for prophecies / Mistake the matter.’ To know this is to be liberated form the plot that Americans wish history to have: ‘All that grave weight of America / Cancelled!’ These lines come from ‘Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain,’ another poem that seems certain to last. As does ‘A Story About Chicken Soup,’ the best of several lovely, quizzical-sombre poems about Simpson's Russian-Jewish origins. And at least a dozen others are here for keeps, including the justly famous and obviously great ‘My Father in the Night Commanding No.’ I haven't liked Simpson's more recent poems; they have become too relaxed, the mannerisms lapsing into cosiness. But anyone who cares about poetry will want to buy and wear out People Live Here.