SOURCE: “Putting Down Smoke,” in Times Literary Supplement, June 30, 1995, p. 25.

In the following review, Burt offers a negative assessment of Ships Going into the Blue.

Like the fifty-odd other books in the University of Michigan's Poets on Poetry series, Louis Simpson's Ships Going into the Blue is a miscellany of its author's prose: one-paragraph fragments, memoirs, travel writing, book reviews, speeches, and semi-academic essays. Many of Simpson's own poems are anecdotes or narratives in as concrete and unadorned a language as he can manage. His pronouncements on poetry-in-general sound like this:

Poetry returns us to seeing and hearing. What we see and hear may not be pretty but it's true. This is, in the words of a poet, “where all the ladders start / In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” … The carpenter who comes to fix the roof, the man who fills your gas-tank, is not likely...