Louis Simpson's poems in Caviare at the Funeral are typically narrative; they are also typically brief, none going beyond a few pages. The poet hasn't made things easy for himself. Telling stories in verse is a demanding procedure because many of the features we appreciate in prose fiction—a sense of events spawning events, of characters developing or disintegrating, days passing into days—are seemingly at odds with the compactness of poetry. It has been often observed that poems relax in style as they grow in length. I would have expected that in composing such brief narratives Simpson's aim would be to avoid this stylistic dilution. But the style of the poems is, if not diluted, systematically understated. There is an odd mingling of effects, offering within tightly drawn boundaries a language that lacks the heightening which many poets would attempt to bring to such pieces.

Because the...