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.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson has been a leading figure in American letters for more than half a century. Born in 1923 in Jamaica, the son of a lawyer of Scottish descent and a Russian mother, he emigrated to America at the age of 17. Voices in the Distance is the first selection of his poetry to be published in Britain for over 25 years, drawing on 18 collections, from The Arrivistes (1949) to his latest book, Struggling Times, which he published last year at the age of 86. Both timely and personal, Louis Simpson's poetry dramatises his continuing quarrel with suburban America, as well as his concerns about the direction of an American society struggling to retain its integrity in the midst of widespread challenges and worldwide strife.

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.

A revealing collection of Louis Simpson's autobiographical reflections and critical essays