Struggling Times

Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Louis Simpson has been a leading figure in American letters for more than half a century. Born in the West Indies, Simpson immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen. He studied at Columbia University, then served the US Army in active duty in Europe during World War II. After the war he continued his studies at Columbia and at the University of Paris. While living in France, he published his first book of poems, The Arrivistes (1949). The poems in Struggling Times find Simpson's distinct imaginative voice working at its full poetic power. Both timely and personal, the poems reveal Simpson's ongoing quarrel with suburban America, as well as the American government's struggle to retain its integrity and honor in the midst of its own aggression and worldwide strife. You have to be careful what you hear or see. In Afghanistan I saw the man and the woman who were caught in adultery buried up to their heads. Their children were brought and told to throw stones. I can still see the headstwisting on the ground. The poor devil in Papillon with his head in the guillotine . . . but Goya's half-buried dog looking up at the sky I think was the worst of all.