Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson (1923-2012) was a leading figure in American letters for more than half a century. Born in Jamaica, the son of a lawyer of Scottish descent and a Russian mother, he emigrated to America at the age of 17. Voices in the Distance was the first selection of his poetry to be published in Britain for over 25 years, drawing on 18 collections, from The Arrivistes (1949) to his final book, Struggling Times, which he published in 2009 at the age of 86. Both timely and personal, Louis Simpson's poetry dramatises his continuing quarrel with suburban America, as well as his concerns about the direction of an American society struggling to retain its integrity in the midst of widespread challenges and worldwide strife. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

From Publishers Weekly In one of the essays in this delightfully engaging self-portrait, poet-critic Simpson calls himself an "unnecessary man," a man without a definite place in the world. His refusal to bow to trends or schools may explain why this Pulitizer Prize-winning poet is not currently fashionable. In limpid, sharp prose he describes growing up in Jamaica when it was a British colony, love for his Russian actress mother, the "low emotions" of his remarried father and stepmother, who treated him like a boarder, his service in WW II, subsequent mental breakdown and partial amnesiaout of which he began writing poetry. When published in the New Yorker , he bemoaned that magazine's "tiresome air of facetiousness" and its heavy-handed editing of his poems. Critical essays gathered here offer unbuttoned cameos of Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Auden, V. S. Naipaul. In the astonishing prose selections culled from his journal, Simpson reveals the poet's essential gift: a continual sense of wonder at the world's unpredictability. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A revealing collection of Louis Simpson's autobiographical reflections and critical essays