The Owner of the House

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 maladjustments 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 “These poems—wry, cantankerous and skillfully made—are a testament to Simpson’s considerable talent.” —David Orr, The New York Times Book Review, Sept. 21, 2003 “For more than forty years he has been among our best poets—one of the sharpest describers of daily, unpoetic life. His language and form have grown steadily plainer, drier, more direct, like an old champagne-tres sec.” —Bill Holm, San Jose Mercury News

On a Disappearance of the Moon

And I, who used to lie with the moon,
am here in a peat-bog.

With a criminal, an adulterous girl,
and a witch tied down with branches...

the glaucous eyeballs gleaming under the lids,
some hairs still on the chin.

© BOA Editions, Ltd 2003 BOA Editions

Available editions:
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Cloth ISBN: 1-929918-38-0
Price: $30.95
Publishing Date: October 2003
Paperback ISBN: 1-929918-39-9
Price: $19.95
Publishing Date: October 2003