What do you think?
Rate this book
Collected Poems
A collection of poems by C.H. Sisson. This text shows how the author grounds his work in English landscapes, especially those of Somerset, and recalls the work of Eliot and Pound, and Hardy and Edward Thomas.
- GenresPoetry
544 pages, Paperback
First published August 27, 1998
1 person is currently reading
17 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 5, 2017
One year ago, I had never heard of a C.H. Sisson. I would have probably asked, "Do you mean Sassoon?" What a dismal oversight—and one this website is equally guilty of. Search Sisson and you won't find him on Goodreads unless you get specific.
Had I paid more attention to Michael Schmidt's superb The Lives of the Poets, I might have paid more attention to Sisson—whom Schmidt discovered and who discovered Shmidt. Together, M.S. published Sisson and Sisson impacted M.S.'s reading.
Sisson is a poet par excellence. The last of the moderns, writing well beyond the time of modernism, Sisson's verse was a living fossil and he knew it. 'For a year, I must have been contemporary', Sisson remarks sardonically. The joke is that the year was 1932—30 years before the man first published. No wonder he translated Ovid's exile poems so many times.
Sisson's essays are crucial to understanding his poems. His poems are crucial to understanding his translations. And his translations are crucial to understanding his essays. He is his own unique holy trinity. He's a man dogged by contradictions: a nihilist, an Anglican (though he claims not by choice), a man who has an entropic and Whorfian view of language yet one who translates constantly, and (most humorously) he is a man who claims he has no personality yet wrote an autobiography. He is more sardonic than Larkin, better read than Eliot, and as critical of verse as Pound. And yet, there is a tenderness in his verse, rooted in questioning his own roots. By the 1980s, Sisson's poetry softens and loses its cut. But the collections he published in the '60s and '70s should be in every anthology surveying English poetry.
Oh, but perhaps I'm a biased woman. I've spent the past six months with Sisson's essays and poems with a gun to my head (held by myself, mind you) as I write my dissertation on his translations and linguistic poems.
Had I paid more attention to Michael Schmidt's superb The Lives of the Poets, I might have paid more attention to Sisson—whom Schmidt discovered and who discovered Shmidt. Together, M.S. published Sisson and Sisson impacted M.S.'s reading.
Sisson is a poet par excellence. The last of the moderns, writing well beyond the time of modernism, Sisson's verse was a living fossil and he knew it. 'For a year, I must have been contemporary', Sisson remarks sardonically. The joke is that the year was 1932—30 years before the man first published. No wonder he translated Ovid's exile poems so many times.
Sisson's essays are crucial to understanding his poems. His poems are crucial to understanding his translations. And his translations are crucial to understanding his essays. He is his own unique holy trinity. He's a man dogged by contradictions: a nihilist, an Anglican (though he claims not by choice), a man who has an entropic and Whorfian view of language yet one who translates constantly, and (most humorously) he is a man who claims he has no personality yet wrote an autobiography. He is more sardonic than Larkin, better read than Eliot, and as critical of verse as Pound. And yet, there is a tenderness in his verse, rooted in questioning his own roots. By the 1980s, Sisson's poetry softens and loses its cut. But the collections he published in the '60s and '70s should be in every anthology surveying English poetry.
Oh, but perhaps I'm a biased woman. I've spent the past six months with Sisson's essays and poems with a gun to my head (held by myself, mind you) as I write my dissertation on his translations and linguistic poems.
June 19, 2014
Read selections for my English Religious Authors seminar at Baylor with Dr. Kevin Gardner (Summer 2014).
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews