Collected PoemsWhen C.H. Sisson was 20, he gave up writing poems. He began once more in his 30s under the stress of war-time, stationed in India. Verse came intermittently, exiguously; the bulk of his early writing in translation ('fishing in other men's waters' he calls it), prose essays and fiction. In the 1960s his poems began to appear. The London Zoo - his first major book - was published in 1961 when the poet was 47. Since that time his place has grown secure: he is one of the few direct English heirs of the great Modernists, a poet who grounds the enormous energies of that movement in English landscapes, especially those of Somerset, and reconciles the legacies of Eliot and Pound on the one hand and of Hardy and Edward Thomas on the other. The epigraph of his 1984 Collected Poems, which this volume updates and corrects, was from John Gower: O gentile Engleterre, a toi j'escrits. |
Contents
In a Dark Wood | 7 |
In Memoriam Cecil De Vall | 64 |
What a Piece of Work is Man | 72 |
Copyright | |
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Aller Moor Barrackpore beauty beside better birds blind blue body bones Brian Higgins Burrington Combe Catullus Cerne Abbas Christmas rose cloud comes CORYDON Cotignac crucifixion DAPHNIS dark dead death DORINDA dream dust earth Eastville Park empty Eurydice everything eyes face fall flesh garden ghost girl gone green grow Gyges hand hear heart hills hope human imagine Karl Marx knew leaf leaves less lies light lips live look lost mind mist morning never night no-one once pass past perhaps poems river rose round seek seems seen Sevenoaks shadows shape silence Sisera skin sleep smile speak speech stand stone STREPHON tears tell things Thomas à Kempis Thomas de Quincey thought thyme touch tree truth turn understand voice wait walk wall wind words youth