"Dying: An Introduction" … was my introduction to Sissman's work, encountered by chance while leafing through a magazine; and I remember being surprised and disturbed by it—my realization being that this was not just something "made up", that the poem's "I" was indeniably speaking of its creator's "appalling" experience. Yet the final section of "Dying: An Introduction" was called "Outbound" and felt oddly and poignantly exhilarating. Released from the doctor's office, Sissman, now introduced to his own death, walks a Boston November street that, of all things, smells like spring. Meeting some college students he is thrown back to his freshman year at Harvard, twenty-one years before, when he discovered for the first time "the source/Of spring in that warm night". So it is with truly a new lease of life that he now, two decades later, sees the November evening, the street, the college girls "As, oddly, not as sombre/As December,/But as green/As anything:/As spring"….

"Dying: An Introduction" became the title of his first volume in 1968; it was soon followed by Scattered Returns (1969) and Pursuit of Honor (1971). Since these were the years when many American poets (Ginsberg, Levertov, Bly, Rich) were using verse to express their detestations of the Vietnam war and the state of the union, and when both zany and portentously toneless voices expressed themselves without reference to any metrical pattern, Sissman's wryly intelligent humor (employed mainly in rough-and-ready iambic pentameters, with occasional bouts of rhyming) looked formally old-hat and insufficiently national or global in its aspirations. At least it did to some of my college students who found his second volume too clever, too fancy, too ironically expert. And so it was, for them….

[Peter] Davison describes him as writing like "an innocent man possessed", and I would emphasize the latter term since Sissman was possessed by his past, the people he knew and cared about, the seasonal cycle, the ways in which we age and harden and sometimes burst out into sudden glory….

[The] most splendid and chilling things in [Hello, Darkness] are found in its posthumous section, especially in three poems—"Homage to Clotho; A Hospital Suite", "Cancer: A Dream", and "Tras Os Montes"—from the final "Hello, Darkness" sequence. Sissman was an admirer of the painter Edward Hopper, and in "American Light: A Hopper Retrospective" he detailed with loving, unsparing accuracy the cityscape of one Hopper painting and the marvellous way that, in another one, "a shaft of sun/Peoples the vacuum with American light". This is also the gift, and the promise, of Sissman's art as it comes to focus, still unsparingly, on the hospital where he is a patient:

        If Hell abides on earth this must be it;
        This too-bright-lit-at-all-hours-of-the-day-
        And-night recovery room, where nurses flit
        In stroboscopic steps between the beds
        All cheek by jowl that hold recoverers
        Suspended in the grog of half-damped pain
        And tubularities of light-blue light.

A very different kind of "hard American light" from the one saluted in the Hopper poem is faced just as truthfully.

Reading these last poems, one's reservations about Sissman's work—its tendency sometimes to go on and on, its relative absence of tonal variety, its quiz-kid clever-boy stuff—pale into insignificance. Sissman loved to use other poet's lines and phrases, deploying them in a manner that very much called attention to itself. The habit must have given him so much pleasure that he never grew out of it; but in his final poems, especially in "Tras Os Montes", one hears the man speaking with visionary power through a literary medium become transparent. Whereas in "Dying: An Introduction" he had emerged from the doctor's office and pronouncement into a November day that felt as green as spring, now, in the final section of "Homage to Clotho",

        Home, and the lees of autumn scuttle up
        To my halt feet: fat, sportive maple leaves
        Struck into ochre by the frost and stripped
        From their umbilic chords to skate across
        The blacktop drive and fetch up on my shoes
        As if including me in their great fall,
        Windy with rumors of the coming ice.
        Not like spring….

William H. Pritchard, "Innocence Possessed," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1978; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 3982, July 28, 1978, p. 847.