SOURCE: A review of Selected Prose, in World Literature Today, Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring, 1990, p. 316.

In the following review, Brown offers a positive assessment of Simpson's Selected Prose.

Louis Simpson's Selected Prose is a companion volume to his recent Collected Poems (1988). Although he has long been established as an important American poet of his generation, born in the same year (1923) as James Dickey, Anthony Hecht, and several others, he came to the States from a somewhat exotic milieu in Jamaica. His father was a lawyer of Scottish descent; his mother was born in Russia. He immediately sets these facts before the reader in his foreword to the new volume, a miscellany of letters, memoirs, journal entries, and literary essays and reviews, which compose a sort of enveloping action for his poems. Since he has increasingly brought the autobiographical element into his verse, the prose pieces, fragmentary though some of...