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Selected Poems

C.H. Sisson

Cover Picture of Selected Poems
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
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  • For his Selected Poems C. H. Sisson chooses more than fifty pieces from seven collections of poetry, the selection ranging from short savage epigrams and squibs, lyrics and eclogues, to long meditative works such as 'Burrington Combe' and 'In Insula Avalonia'.

    The poems follow a rough chronology of composition, opening with the harsh verses written when the poet was serving in the North West Frontier Province and ending near his home ground, in Somerset.

    'My beginnings,' he has written, 'were without facility, and when I was forced into verse it was through having something not altogether easy to say . . . The writing of poetry is, in a sense, the opposite of writing what one wants to write.'
    Born in Bristol in 1914, C. H. Sisson was noted as a poet, novelist, essayist and an important translator. He was a great friend of the critic and writer Donald Davie, with whom he corresponded regularly. Sisson was a student at the University of Bristol where he read English and Philosophy. ... read more
    Praise for C.H. Sisson `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.'
    Donald Hall, New York Times Book Review
    'I think he is worth a place on the short shelf reserved for the finest twentieth-century poets, with Eliot and Rilke and MacDiarmid.'
    Robert Nye, the Scotsman
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