the playful “Just a Whack at Empson,” where at least the subject matter suits its light verse jacket: “Each greening apple has its browning spot:/ The rank of every poet is well-known.” The pun on Browning and its shrewd denial of Empson’s offensive sentence in the second line demonstrate the delightful talent for apt connections and sly technical tricks that are evident throughoutDying.

“Two Encounters”

When dealing with more serious matters, however, the habitual resort to puns and obtrusive rhymes, to endless tag lines from other poets and ceaseless amplification of tropes, can create a humorous detachment that destroys the poem’s quest for transcendence, even as it wins the reader’s admiration. In “Two Encounters,” for example, which is divided into halves, “At the Inn, 1947” and “At the Fair, 1967,” stressing Sissman’s concentration on a scrapbook past and his love of William Wordsworth, the opening lines exemplify the strengths and limitations of such a modus operandi:

Your mink scarf smells as if it smoked cigars,And soot clings in the corners of your eyes,And cold has cancelled your pale cheeks in red,And you stand faintly in a veil of Joy.

The list continues, affirming Sissman’s habit of never knowing when enough is enough, and the tenor of the lines, arch images of a cigar-smoking dead mink and cheeks stamped by red ink, establishes a mood of youthful insouciance appropriate to the time and place, the speaker’s undergraduate days—aided by the borrowing from Randall Jarrell—but in the “altered circumstances” of meeting his “Dark lady of a dozen sonnets” twenty years later, the tone is capable of evoking rue, nothing deeper, even though the ending is salvaged by a beautiful closing on a Ferris wheel: “To hold your airborne arm/ Twenty years later is to ride the calm/ World’s rim against the gravity of time.”

“Two Encounters” is a good poem, generally successful in what it attempts and accomplishes, yet the very nature of its professional performance, its studied self-consciousness, appears to preclude leaps into the sublime. It favors, instead, literature over life, in the sense that risks—of self, of comprehension—are usually avoided, and felt responses are tuned to a distancing knowledge of other poets, other poems, so that poems titled “Peg Finnan’s Wake in Inman Square” and “Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the Spring” are inescapable presences, inviting possibly fatal separations between experience and artifice. Even in “Parents in Winter,” where the portraits of his mother and father might be expected to tap richer feeling, Sissman cannot resist ending “Mother at the Palace, 1914” with coy echoes: “And winning the Bach prize, and having sowed/ Such seeds and oats, at last to marriage./ And so to me? But that’s another story.”

“Dying”

Only in “Dying: An Introduction,” the title poem to his collection, do Sissman’s narrative gift and comic reflexes find an appropriate vehicle, the wry perspective of the persona accentuating the tension supplied by the bleak situation, which involves three visits to the doctor, once for an examination, the second time to have a slice of a dangerous lump removed for a biopsy, and the third visit to hear the dreaded results: cancer of the lymph nodes or Hodgkin’s disease. Divided into five sections, the poem moves from “Summer still plays across the street” to the last section’s November setting, which, ironically, has “a thick smell of spring,” heightened by laughing “college girls” parading in “ones and twos” and “twos and threes” down the street. The previous section’s humorous details—“One Punch and two/ Times later comes the call” in the waiting room, culminating in “one Life further on”—resolves into a series of lean lines that melds unaccustomed spring awareness with memory (of a young sexual episode) and meditative slowness, the autumn world viewed through a new veil of “finity”

As, oddly, not as sombreAs December,But as greenAs anything:As spring.

Death’s grip, “mixing memory and desire,” to quote from T. S. Eliot, a Sissman favorite, has instilled new life.

Scattered Returns

In many ways, Scattered Returns is a duplicate of Dying—the same folio of charming, witty, often facile versifications of vagrant experience and recovered “spots of time,” perceived, as usual, through a net of literary associations—the third poem in the title sequence is “Three Derivative Poems,” inspired by T. S. Eliot.

To match the starkness of “Dying: An Introduction,” there is “A Deathplace,” which foretells: “A booted man in black with a peaked cap/ Will call for me and troll me down the hall/ And slot me into his black car. That’s all.” Assisted by monosyllabic deliberateness, the simple diction and matter-of-fact attitude underlines the fearful banality of death’s impact, its routine quality to others, while the terse last sentence simulates its abrupt finality. Unfortunately, the sequence itself climaxes with “Sonatina: Hospital,” which represents Sissman at his precious worst, straining after a sardonic conceit that eludes sought-for reverberations.

The sole thematic difference between Scattered Returns and Dying might be seen in the ambitious sequence, “A War Requiem,” that concludes the former. Composed in 1969, a year after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, when antiwar feelings were reaching fever pitch, the sequence contains thirty-two sections or individual poems and ranges from “New York, 1929” through four decades to “Twelfth Night, 1969.” Not too surprisingly, the whole is less than its parts, since it is a case of a minor talent struggling to encompass an awesome theme: the manner in which American history had conspired to produce the disasters of the late 1960’s. When read as narrative, a string of dramatic and lyric moments from the author’s past as that past intersected with and humanized crucial national events, “A War Requiem” unwinds like a slowly flipping comic strip, broad and fine strokes blurred at times into caricature.

Most often, the sequence functions efficiently where Sissman is content to isolate his governing metaphor without forcing extra literary or political implications on it, as in section 28, “New York, 1967,” when reflections in Manhattan’s ubiquitous plate-glass windows and a lowered glance captures the city’s dehumanizing patterns, “an absurd/ Theatre without end and without word.” Another successful section, 14, “The ’46s, 1945,” briefly encapsulates the hungry delight with which crowds, weary of war’s deprivations, greet the new car models in Detroit and “sniff the fruit of peace.” A portrait of the Kennedys, disguised as the “O’Kanes” in section 17, “The Candidate, 1952,” is also generally on target, especially the final picture of John F. Kennedy, “moody, willful, and mercuric man,” as prisoner to ambition, “easy in his bonds, under the dour/ And time-releasing sedative of power.”

Other sections are much less felicitous in their convergence of private recollections and historic dramas, once again exposing Sissman’s weakness for misplaced witticisms and easy literary allusions—Eliot is echoed several times. In section 25, “Talking Union, 1964,” for example, in trying to convey the new television image pursued by contemporary labor leaders, which entails smoothness and lies or non sequiturs, he cannot help subsiding into: “So gentlemen/ Are made, not born, with infinite labor pains.” Section 30, “New York, 1968,” a short, impressionistic sketch of Manhattan’s clamor, glibly appeals to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” for its climax, small voices connecting, “and we come true/ To one another, till the rising town’s/ Unhuman voices wake us, and we drown.” Probably the surest indicator of the larger failure of “A War Requiem,” which does not detract from the brilliance of many of the sections, can be found in the image chosen to complete the entire poem, that of a snowy owl glimpsed planning “down its glide path to surprise a vole.” This is not only familiar, owing a debt to Sylvia Plath and, no doubt, others, but also it is also trite and inadequate to its complex subject, however well executed.

With the exceptions already noted, the same can be said of the collection as a whole. Sissman, for good or ill, epitomizes The New Yorker-type poet in full flight, as roughly defined by the deft verses published in that journal during Howard Moss’s long tenure as its poetry editor. (Scattered Returns is dedicated to Moss, whom Sissman had met at Harvard.) The specimen virtues are real and worthy of praise, among them accessibility, formalist intelligence, and an educated predilection for irony, but they do encourage elitist conformity, a poetry of exquisite sensibility (the adjective is instructive) that mandates a voice of muted nuance and wry detachment so persistent as to ensure monotony and, worse, a narrow vision of life’s (and poetry’s) vigorous variety. For Sissman, being a New Yorker poet meant repeated reinforcement of serious defects in style and substance which undermined the bulk of the poetry appearing in the three volumes published during his lifetime.

Hello, Darkness

When putting together Hello, Darkness a few years after its author’s death, Peter Davison, literary executor, decided to group all the poems written after 1971, except for some occasional verse, at the end of the volume. These appear as “A Posthumous Collection” and are broken down into four divisions: “Descriptive and Satirical,” “Nostalgic and Narrative,” “Light and Dreamy,” and “Hello, Darkness,” the latter being probably among the latest. The first group occupies the middle range of Sissman’s achievement, although several of the poems are marked by an appealing retreat from mere virtuosity, as in the pleasantly chilling fable of “The Clearing in the Woods” and “Spring Song,” a more ragged quest to configure death’s approach that overcomes self-indulgence to soar into bitter hatred for the notion of perishing like “a leafless log of body” thrown on a December fire. “The Persistence of Innocence” also strikes a responsive emotional chord, despite lapses into preachy rhetoric.

The verses in the “Nostalgic and Narrative” section are stories from the past reworked into typical pastiches of astute observation, extended tropes, and time-softened sentiment. “At the Bar, 1948” can serve for the rest, replete with wit and genuine skill and charm, but it reminds the reader that autobiography requires more from poetry, that the specifics of someone else’s life can be as dull as home movies, unless transmuted into universal terms. The best of this lot is actually “A Late Good Night,” which shuns confession to record a frustrated man’s passage into suicidal ends.

The small handful of fragments and whole poems in “Light and Dreamy,” true to their Hollywood name, are dominated by characteristic playfulness, urbane resistance to the banal impositions and surreal possibilities inherent in ordinary existence. “To Your Uterus: An Uncompleted Call” is one worth a quick look, and “Dear John,” an amusing versified letter, is another. The last two, “Cockaigne: A Dream” and “Three American Dreams: A Suite in Phillips House,” are weightier endeavors. The former flows along with customary smoothness; a series of dream perspectives on city scenes from the dreamer’s past manages to vivify the anticipated waking up to middle-of-the-night reality and feelings of loss, the dream’s “only evidence being my tears/ Of joy or of the other, I can’t tell.” More hungry for significance, “Three American Dreams” sees America through biography, the nightmare of success, failure, and death’s ever-threatening erasure of both. It is of a piece in the Sissman mode, excessive in its language and metaphors at times, but far from inert.

The central texts of “A Posthumous Collection” surface, however, in the “Hello, Darkness” portion of the book, starting with the first poem, “Negatives,” which makes a virtue of Sissman’s worst flaw, his sways into dense language and image, as if afraid to prune away potential meaning. The tone is bravely jocular—“Hello, black skull. How privily you shine/ In all my negatives”—and exaggeration is a logical evolution of such a voice as it searches for the right figures of speech to convey the negatives’ inner design and purpose:

The tubular members of my rib cage gleamLike tortile billets of aluminum;My hand shines, frozen, like a white batwingCaught in a strobe.

When the climax comes, it brings the necessary release of irony and insight, diminishing death’s menace; future “coroners” are imagined as accepting his mere hunk of dead meat as his “true bills,” instead of the fluorographs and X rays that reveal the beauty and plan beneath flesh’s frail husk. “December 27, 1966” is less sharp, less impressive, because it is hampered by so many tired comparisons, speaking of the moon as a half-dollar, of death’s temptation in terms of high stakes and “the veiled dealer” vending “bad cards.” Even so, the slowly building drift into a closing image of the same moon floating past in dead serenity, “tailed by her consort of stars,” has the merit of a sudden, fertile disjunction in its clash with the shivering night watchman (himself) “pressed against the falling glass.”

“Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite”

The third poem, “Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite,” a set of seven stanzas or sections that follow the speaker from a hospital stay and operation to an uncertain future at home, demonstrates Sissman’s mastery of form and language when pressed by consciousness of death into more telling brevity, a use of abundant poetic resources for needed structural variations, not mere display or compulsion. The initial section reifies the threat, airless and tense, enveloping the entire sequence, “a vacuum waiting for a rupture in/ The tegument,” while he resides, in life, in the hospital, on the sufferance of authorities until “my vistas wither, and I die.”

Governed by contraries, the poem is effective, and the second section introduces a change in tone and tenor, a wish for a woman poet, who sounds like a parody of Marianne Moore, to be singing his song at this brief and fleeting hour. Section 3 resumes a direct address, in which the persona thinks how easy it is to be watching a film, how easy to accept its end, which acts as preamble to the persona suffering a long needle injected into his pelvic arch in pursuit of bone-marrow in front of “starched and giggling girls.” Roles are reversed, and he is the movie star.

Though still intent on the idea of passive anguish and spectacle, of helplessness under the care of others, section 4 returns to the eight-line formula of section 2 to observe, from a calm distance, a male nurse shaving him for the operation. The nurse’s casual reassurances are obviously resented for masking indifference, but the overt response is the language (prose) and common sense of the street: “It is that he must make his living, too.” The lack of stress on “living” gives it added sarcasm in a hospital context.

Another variation in the “suite” of verses comes with the startling switch into full-blooded protest in the fifth section, which begins: “If Hell abides on earth this must be it.” The “it” refers to the recovery room, where he lingers in pain and uncertainty between life and death, a metaphor for the whole experience, where he can finally resort to the gift for analogy he delights in exhibiting without violating formal restraints, as in describing the dryness overwhelming him, “his own/ Throat-filling Gobi, mucous membrane gone/ Dry as Arabia.” The images pile up and are explained in a well-deserved climax: “such wet dreams/ Afflict the dessicate on their interminable way/ Up through the layers of half-light to day”—contraries persist, unifying the sequence, but tonal alterations avoid monotony.

A conversational style prevails in section 6, which is constructed around a basic comparison between walking to the bathroom with his “wheeled I.V. pole” and the riddle of Sphinx, which Oedipus solved, that saw man in the last state of his life as a three-legged creature attached to a cane. Unable to urinate, the persona must accept defeat and return to his bed to await the aid of a young man with “his snake-handler’s fist of catheters.” The ultimate image welds together further contrasts with harrowing precision, his body kept alive by being “tethered” to various “bottles, bags, and tubes,” to the point where its importunities dun the mind “in this refined,/ White-sheeted torture, practiced by a kind,/ Withdrawn white face trained in the arts of love.” Besides once more using irony to amplify polar reversals and displacements, the arts of love as kindness, survival rituals, not sexual manipulations, the poem has established a schema that incorporates ancient Greece, the antithesis of the arctic modern hospital where the body and rote rule, which patently prepares the reader for the last section.

Clotho, one of the three Fates in Greek mythology charged with determining each person’s life span by the length of the thread they sever, is finally granted her homage, after the persona has been released and is met at home by autumn leaves, “fat, sportive maple leaves” that are blown on his shoes, as if including him “in their great fall.” A subtle undercurrent might be adduced here in conjunction with the earlier Sphinx reference, since his fall from health is hardly of the stature of Greek tragedy. Unrepentant punster, he must clamber up “enneads of stairs” to the bedroom where he will recompose himself to enduring existence, a “world of voices and surprises,” for as long “as Clotho draws my filament,” until “her sister widows” cut it off and “send me to befriend the winter leaves.” This quiet, seasonally cyclical climax to the poem and to the sequence articulates a thoughtful decline into civilized acceptance of death and its modern lack of drama as the sole sane reaction contemporary art can muster.

In the first five sections treated as film scenes, “Cancer: A Dream,” Sissman shapes a more surreal drama. The setting is a film studio, with the persona envisioned as an actor repairing to his dressing room after a wearying piece of acting, Shakespearean rage “torn to dated tatters” for an audience of “cavefish.” All he can do, like a patient after surgery, facing death and constant, humiliating observation, is to “undress shakily and lie me down/ In dust on the vast desert of the bed.” What ensues in the next four scenes, skillfully handled to join literal and fantasy elements with a minimum of shock, entails a shift of scene and directions from a script girl, plus an embarrassing inability to respond to the sexual advances of an aged female poet, all of which can be associated with the conditions of a man in the death-throes of a debilitating disease. The climax, a brilliant bit of grotesque maneuvering, has him center stage, performing the dance of death with cancer’s crab—perhaps it is another self as well, certifying Sigmund Freud’s death instinct and affirming the poem’s deeper dimensions.

“Tras Os Montes,” the final poem in “A Posthumous Collection,” equally well sustained, may be the strongest Sissman ever wrote. After two memorial sections devoted to dead parents, illuminating their dying more than their lives to echo his own disintegration, the mountain allusion is realized in an allegorical assault on mountains “In Company” with eleven friends, actual people whom the author expected to attend his funeral. This section, first of three in the poem titled for the sequence, concludes with death as a form of military disgrace, a body thrown from a parapet,

      gaining weightlessnessAs its flesh deliquesces, as its bonesShiver to ashes—into an air that crawlsWith all the arts of darkness far below.

“A Deux” is the heading for the second section, a farewell to a beloved mate, a “new scenario” in which his death is falling upward, into a “stormcloud from the springing field,” where he can spy on her “and rain farewells/ And late apologies on your grey head” before, with a bold, haunting metaphor, the sun lights up his remains as “a tentative rainbow,/ An inverse, weak, and spectral kind of smile.”

Dying is a solo act, however, as Sissman knew, and the third section, “Alone,” reverts to the dependence on paradoxes, a series of ironic oppositions, that motored the other death poems. The persona’s climb to death is now in the guise of an isolated infiltrator, casting off his human ties in “the same selfish spirit” that had inspired Sissman’s “lifelong journey” in the first place.

Thus, death is birth, the primal paradox, the egoistic art that reared “imperial Rome” returning to earth, “its inveterate love/ For the inanimate and its return.” If too dense, on occasion, to match the achievement of its predecessors, “Alone” does not disgrace them, and the sequence, like the collection, manifests sufficient emotional and artistic energy to guarantee Sissman’s poetic survival.