Voices in the Distance

'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. 'Simpson's entire oeuvre can be seen as, among other things, a prolonged fight for America - a struggle for everything that it claims to stand for, and for the real goodness at the heart of many of its people, against all things that are mean, stupid, easy or tawdry - For all his mordant wit, he has never lost his ability to see through to the underlying reality of the human heart and the rolling years' - Bruce Bawer, Hudson Review. '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 soulsA" and plain-facedA" 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 yourselvesA" ' - Frank Allen, Library Journal.