Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson has been a leading figure in American letters for more than half a century. Born in the West Indies, Simpson immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen. He studied at Columbia University, then served the US Army in active duty in Europe during World War II. After the war he continued his studies at Columbia and at the University of Paris. While living in France, he published his first book of poems, "The Arrivistes" (1949).

The poems in "Struggling Times" find Simpson's distinct imaginative voice working at its full poetic power. Both timely and personal, the poems reveal Simpson's ongoing quarrel with suburban America, as well as the American government's struggle to retain its integrity and honor in the midst of its own aggression and worldwide strife.

"You have to be careful"
"what you hear or see."
"In Afghanistan I saw"

"the man and the woman"
"who were caught in adultery"
"buried up to their heads."

"Their children were brought"
"and told to throw stones."
"I can still see the heads"

"twisting on the ground."
"The poor devil in" Papillon
"with his head in the guillotine . . ."

"but Goya's half-buried dog"
"looking up at the sky"
"I think was the worst of all."

"This is the Jamaican-born Simpson's 18th collection; its dry trimeters and tragic resignations should certainly please the faithful fans... Yet the new poems, as much as any in his oeuvre, leave room for unexpected happiness...Simpson believes in endurance and the rewards of the ordinary. He can, at his best, make his readers believe in those things too."

--Publishers Weekly

Louis Simpson's last book, "The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001," (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2003) was finalist for the National Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His other honors include the Prix de Rome, Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, and the Columbia Medal for Excellence.

Few poets have so artfully confronted American life as Louis Simpson. Persona speakers struggle with everyday issues against a backdrop of larger forces, the individual's maladjustment to a culture of materialism and brutal competition, the failure of marriage under the pressures of such a society, the failure of the American dream. Simpson wages a lover's quarrel with the world.

"Louis Simpson has perfect pitch. His poems win us first by their drama, their ways of voicing our ways . . . of making do with our lives. Then his intelligence cajoles us to the brink of a cliff of solitude and we step over into the buoyant element of true poetry."--Seamus Heaney

Educated at Munro College (West Indies) and at Columbia University, Louis Simpson has taught widely, most recently at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry and ten works of prose. He has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the "Hudson Review," the Guggenheim Foundation, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

This is a collection of essays, reviews, and interviews in which the author, himself a distinguished poet, expresses his ideas about the nature of poetry and criticizes his contemporaries. Simpson takes his stand with the "poetry of feeling" and agrees with Woodsworth that poetry should be written in a selection of the language "really spoken by men." His reviews of American poets who have since become famous show Simpson to be an acute an innovative thinker. There are also essays on modern classics: Apollinaire, MacDiarmid, Lawrence, Crane, and Pound. The collection shows the full range of the critic of whom the Times Literary Supplement recently said: "Simpson's critical and narrative voice is very distinctive - it is generous, sympathetic, spontaneously free and wittily fatalistic. Most originally, perhaps, this voice marries criticism, biography, literary and cultural history in an imaginative atmosphere of sheer wonder and discovery."