The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001

by Louis Simpson

Few poets have so artfully confronted American life as Louis Simpson. Persona speakers struggle with everyday issues against a backdrop of larger forces, the individual’s maladjustment to a culture of materialism and brutal competition, the failure of marriage under the pressures of such a society, the failure of the American dream. Simpson wages a lover’s quarrel with the world. "Louis Simpson has perfect pitch. His poems win us first by their drama, their ways of voicing our ways . . . of making do with our lives. Then his intelligence cajoles us to the brink of a cliff of solitude and we step over into the buoyant element of true poetry."—Seamus Heaney Educated at Munro College (West Indies) and at Columbia University, Louis Simpson has taught widely, most recently at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry and ten works of prose. He has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the Hudson Review , the Guggenheim Foundation, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Genres: Poetry

416 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2003

About the author

Louis Aston Marantz Simpson

Reviews

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong]

A fellow blogger reviewed a poem by Louis Simpson and it intrigued me so I bought this book.

I find his poems to be reflective and as capable as giving me a vision of what he's writing about as if he had taken a professional, artistic photograph. A photograph with the same dream like, haunting quality of Diane Arbus' work, except Simpson does it with his writing.

Simpson's parents are European, his mother is Russian Jewish, but Simpson was raised on the island of Jamaica. His poetry encompasses his heritage, particularly the persecution of Jews in WWII, culture on a Caribbean island and his later immigration to America.

Poetry provokes aesthetic responses. The style and substance may resonate with the reader or not. Simpson's did with me.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin]

Many of the poems in this collection read like flash fiction before that was a thing: miniature vignettes of life in medias res as the poet captures moments from his stream of consciousness. “Vandergast and the Girl” is a classic.

Favorite Poems:
“Inspiration”
“A Farewell to His Muse”
“Birch”
“The Inner Part”
“Trasimeno”
“The Mannequins”
“Searching for the Ox”
“Working Late”
“Sway”
“Out of Season”
“Physical Universe”
“Quiet Desperation”
“The Previous Tenant”
“Reflections in a Spa”
“A Bramble Bush”
“The Dental Assistant”

[Kelvin O'Connell]

rating poetry collections is stupid,, individual poems would be better but that's obnoxious. Deserves 5 stars for the late poems alone.

"old copies of The New Yorker,
the glassed-in porch with a view

of snowflakes lightly falling
on grass and a child's swing"

he made the easiest and loosest poetic phrase ever (: "lightly falling") exquisitely beautiful because here its breathing through semi-opaque glass and seen with The New Yorker in your periphery; so I think he's telling the truth.

[Cooch]

A lesson on how to evolve as a poet.

Simpson's continual changing, evolution and growth as a poet throughout his career is remarkable. And perhaps even more remarkable, his voice remains the same. There a few weaker poems amongst the very good and excellent ones.

[Eveline Chao]

Some of the poems bored me but this gets 5 stars since one of my favorite poems ever is in this collection, below:

The Redwoods

Mountains are moving, rivers
are hurrying. But we
are still.

We have the thoughts of giants--
clouds, and at night the stars.

And we have names--guttural, grotesque--
Hamet, Og--names with no syllables.

And perish, one by one, our roots
gnawed by the mice. And fall.

And are too slow for death, and change
to stone. Or else too quick,

like candles in a fire. Giants
are lonely. We have waited long

for someone. By our waiting, surely
there must be someone at whose touch

our boughs sould bend; and hands
to gather us; a spirit

to whom we are light as the hawthorn tree.
O if there is a poet

let him come now! We stand at the Pacific
like great unmarried girls,

turning in our heads the stars and clouds,
considering whom to please.

[Laura Leaney]

These are, for the most part, good poems. Impressively cynical and lean. I love "The Redwoods" and "Country Doctor." Another, "In the Suburbs" is so short and depressing it gives a good idea of Simpson's style:

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.

You get the drift. Regardless of the author's cynicism, I enjoyed most of the poems quite a bit. Even the poems I didn't care for always had a bit or two that I thought pretty wonderful.

[Cooper Renner]

Not every poem is perfect, to be sure, but Simpson's work is so fresh, so solid, so non-solipsistic, so closely observed, that he has very few peers. Perhaps Jack Gilbert--Gilbert's best may be slightly better than Simpson's (*may* be), but Gilbert has so many weak poems. Arguably, Simpson--though a poet--is one of the two or three best American short story writers of the last half century, even though he's writing poems.

[E.J. Cullen]

Where ignorant armies march by night without the biceps.