Many years ago in my reading I was shopping for a good contemporary lyric poet. I had trouble finding what I was looking for until a friend recommended the poems of Louis Simpson. "The best we've got," he said. People Live Here includes more than 100 poems from the author's ten previous books and chapbooks, and from recent uncollected poems. Also included is an afterword by Simpson himself, "The Sake of Words for Their Own Sake."

This latter piece consists of a charming and honest description of Simpson's Jamaican childhood ("I am the other Jamaican, a child of the middle class, some of us white, some 'colored,' but all of us borrowing our manners and prejudices from the English"), his early inspiration to become a writer ("the stories my mother read to me"), his education and war experience, his political awakening and what he was reading at various...