"Hello, Darkness" contains the three volumes of verse Sissman published in 1968, 1969 and 1971, plus 39 poems never before collected. Of these, some are light verse and casual metrical jokes scribbled to friends; but most are in the usual Sissmanesque mode—moments remembered or envisioned with a fascinating specificity, set forth in a dense but dancing blank verse varied by spurts of rhyme, liberally besprinkled with epigraphs and dedications, and frequently arranged in suites of linked episode. Or arranged, perhaps, like snapshots on the pages of an album; among the many petty modern skills that engaged Sissman's intelligence was that of photography, and a hardedged, highlighted, deceptively factual quality balances the elegiac tone of his running, randomly accruing verse autobiography. Elegy deepened, as his long-foreseen death neared, to anguish. His last poems, written before the muse deserted him in 1974 as abruptly as she had descended in 1963, maintained, through the medical humiliations suffered by the slowly dying, his alert eye and exuberant fancy; such a maintenance now appears, on the last pages of his life's work, heroic….

[Sissman] was like no one else, with his benign discursiveness, his nonacademic base, his nostalgic obsession with the 40's. Though he aspired to be a Hopper of words, he seemed less American than British, kin to Auden, Betjeman, Larkin. The crucial influence upon his packed, sometimes convolute pentameters came from centuries away—a youthful "Overdose of Jacobethan diction." With 17th-century richness as a model, his blank verse displayed an aggressive if not prankish wealth of scientifically, commercially, polylinguistically exact terminology and a one-time spelling champion's rakish vocabulary….

Reread entire, the three volumes published during his life-time challenge our patience with so much verbal energy exercised on so consistent a level. So many small astonishments wear responsiveness down, where the matter or point is obscure. The first volume, "Dying: An Introduction" captures the warmest memories … with an effortless facility…. The title piece of the third volume, "Pursuit of Honor," seems more than a touch inflated—an inflated retread at that, for by now the poet-narrator's pursuits of women … have merged into one overly allegorical chase. His material by now, we feel, has been thoroughly covered. The last lines of this sequence even appear, uncharacteristically, to preen upon the poet's "joker's silks." This most unassuming of poets might be accused, on occasion, of a calm that is flat, a certain veiling of central feeling…. [Like Proust, he] sometimes describes without telling; pastness itself justifies the attempt at recapture.

But, in sum, the three volumes comprise, in a way rarely true of poetry since Browning, a world—dense, bustling, brimming with the utterly honorable quotidian truth of a Northeast-American professional man. In the posthumous poems we see—appalling spectacle!—this solid world drained, darkened, and blown away by death. What other poet has ever given such wry and unblinking witness to his own dying?…

None of his editors welcomed his late, exhausted poems upon what had become his sole subject, dying; but now that he is dead, they loom as a final step forward, a mighty act of writing. No wonder he fell silent at last; by 1974 he had written to the edge of oblivion, and through it. (p. 10)