Ebook: A C.H. Sisson reader

Cover; Title Page; Contents; Introduction; Poems; From The London Zoo (1961) and other early poems; On a Troopship; In Time of Famine: Bengal; The Body in Asia; In a Dark Wood; In London; Sparrows seen from an Office Window; In Kent; Maurras Young and Old; On the Way Home; Silence; Ightham Woods; Family Fortunes; In Honour of J.H. Fabre; Nude Studies; Tintagel; To Walter Savage Landor; Cranmer; Knole; On a Civil Servant; Money; Ellick Farm; The Un-Red Deer; The London Zoo; From Numbers (1965); My Life and Times; The Nature of Man; A and B; A Letter to John Donne; Words; The Thrush.;C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of the 1950s and 1960s to the Virgilian Somerset poems to the reflective late poems in which Sisson, looking out on the landscape he cherished, sees himself standing at the ‘last promontory of life'. The essays demonstrate the wit, precision and sheer scope of Sisson's writings on literature, culture and politics (he was a senior civil servant before ret.