In a recent Georgia Review [see excerpt above], Peter Stitt writes that Louis Simpson's People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983 "makes clear that there are three major phases to be found in the body of Simpson's work, phases which are separated by major changes in style, subject matter, and approach." Simpson is certainly one of those poets (like James Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop, to name only a few other such writers of recent vintage) the study of whose entire body of work is particularly rewarding, partly because it exhibits drastic, unpredictable, and yet characteristic change. Anyone who is at all familiar with Simpson's poetry knows that there are two major shifts in his work that divide his canon into three stylistically different parts…. No one who has written on Simpson in the past few years has failed to notice the differences: the highly traditional...