The astonishing thing about Caviare at the Funeral is its radical presentation of American life. It has long seemed to me that Louis Simpson is among the most American of all American poets. Somehow the fact that he was born and raised in Jamaica and came to this country only in his eighteenth year has enabled him to see us, our land and our ways, with unusually clear vision.

His earlier work, especially in At the End of the Open Road, shows an understanding of America rarely seen…. In Caviare at the Funeral Simpson carries his insights several steps further in the creation of a poetry of everyday American life. I don't mean the life we see in most of our poetry, life as it is lived in the university classrooms and college towns, in the slick bars and elegant cafés, nor even on the unreal, atypical...