City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

A C.H. Sisson Reader, edited by Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness

eng

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 retirement). The editors declare, 'No poet has government, and few have had a clearer sense of the role of literature in participating in civic life.' An heir to Marvell, Hardy and Edward Thomas, Sisson brings to this essential Englishness the disruptive energies of modernism. Never a comfortable or comforting writer, he is an incisive intelligence and speaks with clarity to the twenty-first-century reader's expectations and discontents

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

A C.H. Sisson Reader

dictionaries

894171392

edited by Charlie Louth and Patrick McGuinness

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. -- Adam and EveEaster -- In Memoriam Cecil De Vall -- The Death of a City Man -- No Title -- Thomas de Quincey -- The Theology of Fitness -- What a Piece of Work is Man -- The Reckoning -- From a Train -- Numbers -- From Metamorphoses (1968) -- Virgini Senescens -- Catullus -- In Allusion to Propertius, I, iii -- The Person -- Every Reality is a Kind of Sign -- On my Fifty-first Birthday -- From the new poems in In the Trojan Ditch (1974) -- The Discarnation -- No Address -- Evening -- Aller Church -- The Usk -- Morpheus -- Somerton Moor -- In insula Avalonia -- Martigues -- A Ghost (1974, uncollected) -- From Anchises (1976) -- Cotignac -- The Quantocks. -- GardeningThe Evidence -- Eastville Park -- Marcus Aurelius -- The Garden -- Anchises -- Troia -- Est in conspectu Tenedos -- From Exactions (1980) -- The Desert -- Place -- The Zodiac -- The Pool -- Differently -- Style -- Ham Hill -- Moon-rise -- from The Garden of the Hesperides (****) -- The Herb-garden -- The Surfaces -- The Red Admiral -- The Morning -- For Passing the Time -- Leaves -- Autumn Poems -- Across the Winter -- In Flood -- Burrington CombeFrom the new poems in Collected Poems (1984) -- The Time of Year -- Two Capitals -- Athelney -- The Broken Willow -- Blackdown -- From God Bless Karl Marx! (1987) -- Read me or not. -- Vigil and Ode for St George's DayWaking -- The Absence -- The Hare -- God Bless Karl Marx! -- Looking at Old Note-Books -- Taxila -- From Antidotes (1991) -- Fifteen Sonnets -- The Christmas Rose -- Uncertainty -- Muchelney Abbey (from On the Departure) -- From What and Who (1994) -- The Mendips -- Et in Arcadia ego -- Steps to the Temple -- April -- The Lack -- Peat -- Trees in a Mist -- The Levels -- Broadmead Brook -- Absence -- Casualty -- Poems from Collected Poems (1998) -- Five Lines -- Triptych -- Tristia -- The Verb To Be -- Indefinition -- Finale -- Translations -- Roman Poems -- Carmen Saeculare (Horace) -- Palinurus (Virgil, Aeneid V, 835ff.). -- The Descent (Virgil, Aeneid VI)Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi (Horace, Odes I, xi) -- Hactenus arvorum cultus (Virgil, Georgics II) -- Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume (Horace, Odes II, xiv) -- Essays -- From the New English Weekly (1937-1949) -- Charles Maurras and the Idea of a Patriot King -- Prejudice as an Aid to Government -- English Liberalism -- The Civil Service -- Charles Péguy -- Epitaph on Nuremberg -- T.S. Eliot on Culture -- Ego Scriptor -- The Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound -- Order and Anarchy -- An Essay on Intellectual Liberty -- Charles Maurras -- Reflections on Marvell's Ode