The simultaneous publication of these two books—People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949–1983 and The Best Hour of the Night—offers the opportunity for both a retrospective view of the career of Louis Simpson and an assessment of his maturest and most characteristic work. People Live Here, which is based upon seven separate earlier volumes, 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.

The poems in Simpson's first three books—The Arrivestes (1949), Good News of Death (1955), and A Dream of Governors (1959)—are written in tight, traditional English lyric forms, forms that have the effect of dissociating the poet's sensibility from the very material he is attempting to write about. In many of these early efforts, Simpson sounds rather like the new metaphysical poets, who had their vogue...