SOURCE: “Foot Soldier for Life,” in Parnassus, Vol. 21, Nos. 1–2, 1996, pp. 138–45.

In the following review, Beaver discusses the evolution of Simpson's distinct poetic voice and aesthetic approach—as evident in Collected Poems and Selected Prose—and offers a favorable assessment of Simpson's mature work in There You Are and The King My Father's Wreck.

With almost every volume of collected poems the question arises: Are we to read it from front to back or from back to front? That is, should the poet's completed opus be assessed from the perspective of its mature and final achievement or from the first careless rapture of its earliest aspiration? The Collected Poems of Louis Simpson, it can be safely said, are climactic. There are some indubitable successes scored in the quarter of a century between 1940 and 1963, but the volume gathers strength only in the quarter of a century that follows. The lyrical...