Like the fifty-odd other books in the University of Michigan's Poets on Poetry series, Louis Simpson's Ships Going into the Blue is a miscellany of its author's prose: one-paragraph fragments, memoirs, travel writing, book reviews, speeches, and semi-academic essays. Many of Simpson's own poems are anecdotes or narratives in as concrete and unadorned a language as he can manage. His pronouncements on poetry-in-general sound like this:

Poetry returns us to seeing and hearing. What we see and hear may not be pretty but it's true. This is, in the words of a poet, “where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” … The carpenter who comes to fix the roof, the man who fills your gas-tank, is not likely to be confused by ideas. But we, the so-called educators, receive ideas from every direction and are in danger of not knowing what to believe. This is where poetry comes in: it brings us back to our perceptions and sense of the real.

Besides condescending to gas station attendants, this mission-statement ignores the confusing abstractions—from the Immaculate Conception to the free market—which have influenced everybody's behaviour, often without our realising it. But Simpson has no time for abstractions, and very little for argument; his many dismissive asides aimed at Theory, and at Creative Writing Workshops, have the feel of a car idling—smoke emerges, there's a growling sound, but nothing is moving, and no new ground is covered.

Simpson's essays on individual poets are refreshingly candid, and maddeningly impercipient: he can't stand (or understand) Mark Strand or Ashbery, and is hostile to Auden, whom he condemns as “camp.” A failure to do his homework, to find out what others have said before him, or to ask what the people who disagree with him could possibly have been thinking and why, mars almost every one of his longer pieces. He explicates Heaney's “Station Island” without consulting Field Work, and thus mistakes Heaney's cousin Colum McCartney for the slain shopkeeper from earlier in the poem. An essay on Whitman's “strategies of sex” introduces a familiar thesis (straight nineteenth-century readers would not have known that Whitman was homosexual), as if it were entirely novel.

The autobiographical prose mixes fun facts with patronizing generalities: “in Ireland present and past are inseparable. To walk on a road in Ireland or sit by the water is to be conscious of the past. Their ever-present consciousness of the past makes for poetry …” If this is what Simpson's own ideas are like, no wonder he wants to banish them from poems. James Wright deserves the encomium Simpson gives him, and Les Murray gets a welcome hearing; but most of this book is for people who love Simpson's poems so much that they want to own every scrap of his prose, or else for future sociologists of literature, who will want to know what a fairly successful twentieth-century poet of average intelligence thought of his contemporaries, and what his contemporaries thought of him.