Selected Poems

Sisson is the quintessential English litterateur: career civil servant, poet with over 20 collections published since 1959, essayist, editor, novelist, critic and translator (Latin and other languages). The first poems here date from WW II; the last, a sequence, was written in 1995 when Sisson was 81. Throughout, his concerns are similiar: identity; mind and body; age; culture; landscape. His judgments of himself, and of humanity generally, are often harsh. ""I have no person fit for resurrection,"" he says in an early poem; in one of the latest he writes, ""So fumbling bodies try to make/ Friendship and love as best they can:/ None ever was without mistake/ and lies by woman and by man."" Sisson is consistently plain, if not always clear; in these poems, he is rarely adventurous in meter or language. Individual poems--""On My 51st Birthday"" and ""The Mappemonde""--are outstanding, but the collection overall has a one-note tone and seems somewhat dated and weighty. (June)