There You Are

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