Sissman's poetry, like his life, is singular and problematic. Possibly a good many Harvard graduates now executives in advertising agencies write verse; some may have published it; one or two may, like Sissman, have discovered themselves stricken with a fatal illness (in his case, Hodgkin's disease). But surely no one else, after such knowledge, could then go on to write a poem in which a biopsy specimen (it "Turns out to end in -oma") is described as "my / Tissue of fabrications." Nearly all of Sissman's poems were written after the discovery, and nearly all of them are, at least by moments, funny, sometimes outrageously so. How is this to be accounted for? Auden said that wit demanded imagination, moral courage, and unhappiness: "an unimaginative or a cowardly or a happy person is seldom very amusing." Sissman is a witty and amusing poet indeed; and he must have fulfilled the conditions mentioned. But the laughter afforded by [the poems collected in Hello, Darkness]—once the reader knows—is of a peculiar kind: it is as hard to hold as dry ice; it chills, it burns, and vanishes in white smoke.

Without the resources of wit, irony, and moral detachment a writer cannot successfully treat the subjects that attracted Sissman. (pp. 407-08)

["At The Bar, 1948"] points to other Sissmanian earmarks—his punning and extended conceits. Verbal play is of course "popular," even vulgar…. But Sissman doesn't mind that his verses have lapses of taste; he doesn't insist that they lead sheltered lives. The puns are left in, along with other kinds of wildly proliferating wit—temporary ambiguities set up by enjambment, wrenched Byronic rhymes, parodies, and ingenious solving of prosodic problems. The poems remind us that ingenuity is one of the forms the irrational takes in poetry (as the root genius suggests) and that it is a kind of divination. The poet who works out a conceit, for example, soon has to break through the normal condition of self-deception and tell everything he knows in order that all possible analogies between reality and its metaphors be drawn. The conscious desire to be artful seduces the unconscious into yielding up what it has been hoarding. Skill is a daimon, part and parcel of "the serious business of what / An artist is to do with his rucksack / Of gift, the deadweight that deforms his back / And drives him on to prodigies of thought / And anguishes of execution."

At the same time it should be remarked that Sissman can dispense with these aids and still produce excellent lines…. (p. 409)

What is strange is that the horrifying hospital poems near the end of Hello, Darkness do rely on Sissman's usual wit and detachment; the voice coming, for most intents, beyond the grave keeps its humor in the presence of the unforgivable. The pain and ignominy of illness are given clearance to become the substance of the poems "Clotho: A Hospital Suite" and "Cancer: A Dream," poems the more unbearable to read as the poet's patience is exemplary. It is well that the volume concludes not with these but with the remarkable "Tras Os Montes," an unflinching and sovereign gesture toward the imagined landscape of death…. (pp. 409-10)