There You Are [Paperback]

Louis Simpson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A joy of narrative poetry is its capacity to deliver complexity within a simple forward-moving framework. Simpson, writing masterfully at the peak of a long and prize-winning career (e.g., Pulitzer and Prix de Rome), introduces us to characters conjured from his years in academia, his work in the publishing business and from trips abroad. This cast calls to mind the dramatis personae of Raymond Carver, each going about daily life, absorbing agonies and pleasures that then absorb both author and reader. Combining straightforward diction with oblique insights, Simpson limns people and stories with an irony tempered by compassion. "Stairs," an exchange with a carpenter whose athlete son died after climbing five flights, ends simply: "He is a man/ with a great deal on his mind." Underpinning the collection is the poet's own search for significance among his experiences. He is not above ending a piece with a "So What?" or a "What for?" as he repeatedly wonders aloud about the value of living. It seems a stable stance, hard-earned, inarguable.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A distinguished poet and essayist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for At the End of the Road, Simpson (b. 1923) remains allusive, antielitist, mellow, and keenly observant. His ruminative songs have a perceptive, understated wit that is hard to maintain "in a struggle to the death." Between despair and knowingness, a Simpson poem has a William Carlos Williams-like interest in "those people in the street/who stay up all night long." It's pleasant to be in the company of this vigorous humanist, who seems to fathom the importance of experience down to a marvelous, irreducible core. His illuminating, unfussy stories about Russian pogroms, lonely immigrants, belly dancers, "lost souls," and "plain-faced" schlemiels document a hidden, vanished side of American urban life. What Simpson hears in a rain storm describes his own vision: "Be afraid/and know yourselves." Highly recommended.?Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Publisher: Story Line Press; First Edition edition (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885266170
• ISBN-13: 978-1885266170
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #6,022,869 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simpson's There You Are tells us where we are, September 21, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: There You Are (Paperback)

The United States does not, as far as I can tell, have anyone worthy of being called "our greatest living poet." Furthermore the "usual suspects"--John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Allen Ginsberg [heaven forbid]--are all seriously flawed and limited writers. If one wanted to look, on the other hand, for "most skillful living poet" or perhaps even a term as innocuous as "best living poet", two names come immediately to my mind: Jack Gilbert and Louis Simpson. Both men have been largely overlooked, despite their awards and nominations for awards. Both have worked quietly and with little fanfare for decades. And both continue to produce first-rate work, long after one might have presumed their careers to be exercises in treading water. Simpson's latest collection, There You Are, breaks no new ground, but his "old" ground is so marvelous, so incisive, so masterfully presented, that he triumphs simply to be able to continue at that level. His materials are both the everyday matter of American life, including reruns of I Love Lucy, and the slightly more esoteric matter of publishing and university life. But out of these mundane materials Simpson create poems which are anything but mundane. His insights cut to the quick, like the most literate stand-up satirist you can imagine. "Modern" American life is laid bare with an intelligence that rivals Mark Twain's, but Simpson's facility with the language, the "American" rather than the English language, renders his works pure poetry and not sociology disguised as verse. Forget the politically correct versifiers currently holding forth on all our college campuses; forget the solipsists who cannot seem to write of anything but their unhappy childhoods; forget the easy surrealists who think combining a chicken's feet with a bar graph creates a deep and vivid imagery. Read There You Are; and then, read it again, to make sure you haven't missed anything. Simpson is a master, one of the very best we have ever had