Overview
When 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, prose essays, and fiction. One of the few direct English heirs of the great Modernists, Sisson is 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. This updated volume updates and corrects the poet's previous works and demonstrates his confidence vis a vis the poetic genre.Reviews
"His poems move in service of the loved landscapes of England and France; they sing (and growl) in love of argument, in love of seeing through, in love of the firm descriptions of moral self-disgust, they move in love of the old lost life by which the new life is condemned." —New York Times Book ReviewAuthor Biography
C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914 and educated at the University of Bristol and then in Germany and France before the War. He entered the Civil Service, served with the British Army in the North West Frontier Province, and returned to Whitehall, taking early retirement in 1974. He was made a Companion of Honour for services to literature and is the author of the novel Christopher Homm and Collected Translations.
