SOURCE: “Louis Simpson's Singular Charm,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XLVIII, No. 3, Autumn, 1995, pp. 499–507.

In the following review, Mason praises Simpson's war poems and his memoir, The King My Father's Wreck, but finds shortcomings in Ships Going into the Blue and Simpson's later poetry.

They will send me off to Heaven when all I want is to live in the world. 

—“Searching for the Ox”

Louis Simpson was born in Jamaica in 1923, the son of a prominent lawyer and an aspiring opera singer whose family were Russian émigrés. Their marriage ended while Simpson was still in school. The boy who would become a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet discovered only when he joined his mother in New York that her family were assimilated Jews. This is the rich and confusing identity Simpson has explored throughout his career. His childhood was that of a British colonial and public school boy...