Selected Poems [Paperback]

C. H. Sisson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1996

Ford Madox Ford, who had a subtle ear for the understated excellence of the nineteenth century writers, called her "the most valuable poet that the Victorian age produced." Her modern admirers are many, especially among the poets. Philip Larkin speaks of her poetry as "unequalled for its objective expression of happiness denied and a certain unfamiliar steely stoicism." This book provides Christina Rossetti's poetry in a simple volume, and includes an informative introduction to help identify the proper context in which to read her work.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sisson is the quintessential English litterateur: career civil servant, poet with over 20 collections published since 1959, essayist, editor, novelist, critic and translator (Latin and other languages). The first poems here date from WW II; the last, a sequence, was written in 1995 when Sisson was 81. Throughout, his concerns are similiar: identity; mind and body; age; culture; landscape. His judgments of himself, and of humanity generally, are often harsh. "I have no person fit for resurrection," he says in an early poem; in one of the latest he writes, "So fumbling bodies try to make/ Friendship and love as best they can:/ None ever was without mistake/ and lies by woman and by man." Sisson is consistently plain, if not always clear; in these poems, he is rarely adventurous in meter or language. Individual poems?"On My 51st Birthday" and "The Mappemonde"?are outstanding, but the collection overall has a one-note tone and seems somewhat dated and weighty.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

The Absence
Aller Church
April
Autumn Poems
Azure May Fade
Beside The River
The Birth Of Venus
Broadmead Brook
Casualty
Christmas At The Greyhound
The Christmas Rose
Conscience
The Consequence
Crammer
A Duckling
Easter
Eastville Park
Ellick Farm
Est In Conspectu Tenedos
Et In Arcadia Ego
Evening
Family Fortunes
Figure
Gardening
The Geese
Good-day, Citizen
The Hare
The Herb-garden
Hola
Homo Sapiens Is Of No Importance
I Who Am
In A Dark Wood
In Allusion To Propertius, I, 111
In Flood
In Honour Of J. H. Fabre
In Insula Avalonia
In Memoriam Cecil De Vall
In Other Words
In The Silence
In Time Of Famine: Bengal
The Lack
A Letter To John Donne
The Mappemonde
Marcus Aurelius
Martigues
Metamorphoses
Money
Moon-rise
Moriturus
Narcissus
The Nature Of Man
On A Drawing
On A Troopship
On My Fifty-first Birthday
Over The Wall: Berlin, May 1975
Peat
The Person
Preface (catallus)
Reason
The Red Admiral
The Regrets
The Rope
The Rose
Sisson's Good-night
Somerton Moor
The Sow's Ear
Sparrows Seen From An Office
The Spring-time
Sumptuary Laws
Taxila
The Temple
The Test
Things
The Trade
The Un-red Deer
Uncertainty
The Usk
Valediction (catullus)
Virgini Senescens
Waking
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

Product Details

• Paperback: 94 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (June 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811213277
• ISBN-13: 978-0811213271
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,903,683 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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