The Simple Men (2012; ISBN 978-1-906120-60-3) is a 70pg paperback book of ~42 free verse poems and a few short prose pieces, most a few stanzas in length but the longest, “The Ice Fisherman at Dusk” covers ~20 pages; some have been previously published in obscure academic poetry journals. Some of his pieces are online, linked from his poetry page: “The River Bridge”, “The Brook”, “The Mill River”, “A Stop on the Road North” & “The Simple Man Arriving Through the Fields” (both also in The Simple Men). Those are representative. How much you like the collection will depend on your fondness for modern free verse about nature, vaguely spiritual musings, and incidents from ordinary lives - how much, for example, you thrill to lines like the last 2 stanzas of “The Simple Man in Love with the Sound of Things”:

and through the walls the frail
transmissions of our neighbors’ living - and too
this eruption
of crickets in the summer fields,

this slow harmony of beats
which is the sound of everything loving
and warring in unison.

One piece that struck me is the short prose piece “The Ghost” (which works better for not being jammed into a free verse formatting):

We saw a ghost one day, while we were playing. All the children from our street had come together to run in and out of the bushes and trees, a chaotic chasing sort of game, everyone sweaty and pine-scratched. Someone up a tree saw a boy in a blue shirt standing by a mail box on the far side of the road, just standing there with a strange face. We ran to see who it was but he was gone. We raced up and down the houses, we dove into the leaves, we caught snatches of his shirt, flutters in our eye-corners, but never found the boy. We talked about the ghost for weeks - the glimpses we’d all had.

What color will the fire be when these ridiculous things burn?

The Buddhist undertones reminds me of Christine Hartzler’s “The Teachings”, as does to some extent the final stanza of “The Boy Who Got Lost Following a River”, “I walk the starry meadows, the cool hampers of August / where the bees of midnight / gather their strange pollen.” I wouldn’t emphasize this too much since being genuinely Buddhist would be a bit contradictory to the ethos of the poems, put explicitly in the end of the prose piece “Ocean Point”:

…It was Tuesday, the hotel kitchen was closed and there would be no staff meal so we had to fend for ourselves. We ordered what we wanted and then crossed the road to the schoolyard, where in the middle of a perfect lawn arced the ropes and pipes of new-looking play equipment. For fifteen minutes we pumped our legs on the swings and launched ourselves into darkness. When the pizzas were ready we took them back to the staff house and tore off pieces in our mouths and ate, because we loved life, and we wanted to go on living.

I didn’t think much of “At Whately Dinner”, which seems to try for shock value in explicitness, and comes off juvenile and degrading to read. Troupes often tries too hard with phrases and obscure words, using them when there is no particular impact; “The Deer on the Sunsetting Hill” offers many examples: “rich vernum”, “Flees / across the lea, through evening’s / furnace-draft”, “Exquisite vacancy”, “Taper of autumnal sabbath”, “the betrothed / quicken their beauty and truth”, “the rubied heat of the fragile imperfect”, “an owl / downs its mouse-pith”, “O Love, listen / please, listen, and remember me to the whole - / the deer settled in its truth / the air velvet-smooth / with river smell”.

T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens could get away with what they did because they had an infallible ear for rhythm and expression, so their glittering generalities worked. They don’t usually work here, and it’s a bit agonizing trying to get through some of the poems (I must confess, while I’ve read it twice, I have not actually read “The Icefisherman at Dusk” because my eyes keep glazing over a few pages in). A less kind reviewer might mock some of the expressions (“each tree in the rain shaking / grandly / like a tree in the rain”) but I cannot because I detect no insincerity or dishonesty here; Troupes deserves to write good poems, but I’m not sure he can. (Randall Jarrell puts his thumb on this tendency: “When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems — people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets — it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, ‘Well, never mind. You’re still the only one that can write poetry.’”)

My usual standard for poetry anthologies is whether I felt compelled to copy or keep any; like The Fountain, I found nothing in The Simple Men I wanted to keep.