Customer Reviews

Night Music: Poems

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I'd never heard of the late L.E. Sissman till I went to a reading of poems from this book at Harvard. Peter Davison and John Updike reminisced about him and read his wonderful story-poems with zest and humor and real tenderness. Was there ever a poet who wrote about his youth with more manic joy, or about his own dying (from Hodgkin's disease) with more unblinking frankness? I doubt it, and I doubt that there is another poet of his generation (the sixties) who wrote with such immediate accessability--he's a poet every American dog or cat can understand and enjoy. What a find! Thank you Mr. Davison for bringing him back into print.

I met Ed Sissman back in 1946 in Cambridge, Massachusetts while a student at Wheaton College. He was a gentle giant. He would write me poems; I suspect I was his first girlfriend. I lost touch before I married in early 1949. When he began publishing poetry in the New Yorker magazine I wrote him a fan letter, and we had lunch in Boston where he showed me page proofs of a new poem. That was in 1966. Thereafter, it was easy to follow his life through his monthly Atlantic Monthly articles and subsequently follow the course of his fatal illness. I love his poetry. He wrote about his daily trials and happinesses clearly and understandably, unlike so much modern poetry, and with wry humor. The world has lost its innocent bystander who would have enlivened our contemporary world with wit and compassion.