In the Room We Share

by Louis Simpson

Poems deal with art, travel, family life, language, work, urban life, nature, publishing, love, cars, meditation, history, and happiness

155 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1990

About the author

Louis Aston Marantz Simpson

Reviews

[Cooper Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simpson at his best, as in most of this volume, is superb--not so much poetry in any traditional sense as prose so finely honed and trimmed as to become poetic. There is nothing "new" here in the sense of an expansion of his form or a development of his considerable skills, but there is not really any need for that: since his style became fully adult and fully his own, in At the End of the Open Road (1963), he has been a master working at the top of his game. He is in one sense the 20th century's Whitman, more truly delineating what "Americans" are than anyone else; in another sense, he is the anti-Whitman, not at all concerned to establish that he and other Americans are one and the same, but rather to view them, and himself, as dispassionately (but not passionlessly) as possible. 100 pages of poems, supplemented by a 40 page memoir of a visit to Italy to spend time with his very elderly mother. A superb book.

Reading yet again: April 2026. Still superb.