Selected Poems

by Sisson, C. H.

• ISBN13: 9780811213271
• ISBN10: 0811213277
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-06-17
• Publisher: New Directions

Summary

C. H. Sisson's Selected Poems presents a half century's work by the writer deemed "England's finest living poet" by the London Times. Sisson's poems are characterized by a mastery of speech rhythms and imagery learned from Eliot, Pound, and T. E. Hulme. Serious and highly charged, they are steeped in literary tradition (Sisson is one of the great translators of Dante, Horace, Lucretius, and Virgil), and they draw on Sisson's remarkable knowledge of history and culture. Starting with poems written on a troopship and ending on home ground in Somerset, England, Selected Poems provides a comprehensive selection of Sisson's work, including "Tristan," a sequence written in the poet's eighty-first year.

Table of Contents

Foreword
On a Troopship	p. 7
In Time of Famine, Bengal	p. 7
In a Dark Wood	p. 8
Sparrows Seen from an Office	p. 8
A Duckling	p. 9
Moriturus	p. 9
Family Fortunes	p. 10
In Honour of J. H. Fabre	p. 12
Cranmer	p. 12
Money	p. 13
Ellick Farm	p. 13
The Un-Red Deer	p. 14
Good-Day, Citizen	p. 14
The Nature of Man	p. 15
A Letter to John Donne	p. 16
Easter	p. 17
Loquitur Senex	p. 18
The Temple	p. 18
In Memoriam Cecil de Vall	p. 19
Christmas at the Greyhound	p. 20
Virgini Senescens	p. 21
In Allusion to Propertius, I, iii	p. 24
Preface (Catullus)	p. 25
Valediction (Catullus)	p. 26
The Rope	p. 26
The Person	p. 27
The Regrets	p. 28
On my Fifty-First Birthday	p. 29
Homo Sapiens is of No Importance	p. 30
Metamorphoses	p. 31
The Consequence	p. 40
Evening	p. 42
Aller Church	p. 42
The Usk	p. 43
In Spring-Time	p. 45
Sumptuary Laws	p. 45
Somerton Moor	p. 46
In Insula Avalonia	p. 47
Martigues	p. 54
Marcus Aurelius	p. 57
Gardening	p. 58
Eastville Park	p. 59
Over the Wall	p. 59
Est in Conspectu Tenedos	p. 61
Reason	p. 63
Moon-Rise	p. 63
The Herb-Garden	p. 64
The Red Admiral	p. 65
Narcissus	p. 66
Autumn Poems	p. 67
In Flood	p. 68
Waking	p. 69
The Absence	p. 70
The Hare	p. 70
Things	p. 71
Conscience	p. 72
Sisson's Good-Night	p. 72
Taxila	p. 73
The Christmas Rose	p. 74
The Birth of Venus	p. 75
The Test	p. 75
Uncertainty	p. 76
Azure may Fade	p. 76
The Sow's Ear	p. 77
The Geese	p. 77
In Other Words	p. 78
Et in Arcadia Ego	p. 79
Hola	p. 80
The Trade	p. 80
April	p. 81
The Lack	p. 81
Peat	p. 82
Beside the River	p. 82
Figure	p. 83
Broadmead Brook	p. 83
I who am	p. 84
On a Drawing	p. 85
The Mappemonde	p. 86
In the Silence	p. 88
The Rose	p. 89
Casualty	p. 90
Tristia	p. 90
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