SOURCE: “A Sky Lit with Artillery: The Poems of Louis Simpson,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XLII, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 158–64.

In the following review, McDowell offers a positive assessment of Simpson's Collected Poems and praises Simpson's contribution to American poetry.

Of the eight individual and two selected volumes that Louis Simpson has written and published since 1949, four are definitive books in the development of twentieth-century American poetry. They include The Arrivistes: Poems, 1940–1949, At the End of the Open Road (1963), Searching for the Ox (1976), and The Best Hour of the Night (1983). Though all ten volumes, which are handsomely represented in the new book [Collected Poems], contain individual poems of lasting value, these four most command our retrospective attention. They do so because their poems introduce and perfect Simpson's unique characteristics in manipulating form and content, characteristics that poets who came after him have had to contend with and learn from...