The late L. E. Sissman inherited from the post-war literary generation—which would really almost have been his own, had it not been for a long poetic silence—the love of impeccable pentameters, word-play, conceit, and allusion. Sometimes … Sissman loved these things far too well…. Usually his gamesmanship is of a [fine],… delicate kind, as in the lines about an adulterous couple pipe-dreaming of a future where "Bach plays/Behind them all their minuends of days," and where the reader hears "minuet," "diminuendo," and (to my ear) Prufrock's "butt-ends of my days," over the récherché literal word—"in arithmetic, the number or quantity from which another (the subtrahend) is to be subtracted"—in a wonderful shimmer of illusion and reality. Nevertheless, Sissman's brand of cleverness gave his poems a certain vers de société lilt that could not always be sloughed at will.

Sissman's posthumous well-wishers have, I think, exaggerated in suggesting that he was the only poet of his time to turn to bourgeois themes. What was unusual—since it is a virtue far more characteristic of fiction writers than of poets—was his indiscriminate curiosity about how life is lived on the surface. His poems are full of the kind of details we all feel we have noticed without noticing—like the poet's father shaking his hand at the train station, "fraternally … in the firm, funny grip / Of the Order of Fathers and Sons."… Sissman's strength, I think [lies] in his power to suggest the symbolism of incidentals—the narrow five-story house, the fireworks display—lightly, without making his characters portentously aware of it. His corresponding defect is a greater difficulty in gearing his verse to the level of truly private feeling….

This inevitable gap, between observation, however vivid, and the inner sense of a life, was Sissman's perilous passage in his exhaustive autobiographical writing as well. But there, certain themes had an almost irresistible power to ferry him across, and make his cleverness a servant and not a master…. The mortality of others—notably his parents—also drew from him some of his finest writing:

   My mother, with a skin of crêpe de Chine,
   Predominantly yellow-colored, sheer
   Enough to let the venous blue show through
   The secondarily bluish carapace,
 
   Coughs, rasps, and rattles in her terminal
   Dream, interrupted by lucidities,
   When, suctioned out and listening with hard
   Ears almost waned to stone, she hears me say,
   "Mother, we're here. The two of us are here.
   Anne's here with me," and she says, "Anne is so—
   So pretty"
                              ("TRAS OS MONTES")

The beauty of these lines lies in the way they combine inevitable undertones of anecdotal past and Oedipal drama with so awesomely real a sense of the withdrawnness of the dying. Only the dreadful, vital irony of the combination calls for wit, and only there does wit come, with disciplined wryness, into play. By such passages as this, Sissman earned his laurels, even in a very strong age for autobiographical narrative poetry. (pp. 100-02)