SOURCE: “Mumbling and Clanging,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 10, 1991, p. 22.

In the following excerpt, Mackinnon offers an unfavorable assessment of In the Room We Share.

Louis Simpson's new book [In the Room We Share] contains forty-nine poems and a prose journal about a visit to his ailing mother in Italy. In the course of the latter, Simpson reads Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. It “isn't a story, it reads like philosophy. I seem to recall that Saul Bellow was much taken with it at one time,” he observes. The tired slackness masks a barb, but that may not be intended: the difficulty of telling is not earned by the putative point, though, which is trivial. Too often in this volume, a similar failure to judge the distances between writer, subject and reader damages the work.

For instance, in “A Bramble Bush,” the poet sets out after a straying dog...