Selected Poems
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- £26.99
Publisher Description
First published in 2002. This is a collection of poems, songs and couplets by Christina Rossetti, including Maude: A Story For Girls, Christina's Maude is undoubtedly a self-portrait, and a highly critical one-but critical with standards of scrupulosity. The place of Christina's birth was 38 Charlotte Street, Portand Place, London; the date, 1830.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sisson is the quintessential English litterateur: career civil servant, poet with over 20 collections published since 1959, essayist, editor, novelist, critic and translator (Latin and other languages). The first poems here date from WW II; the last, a sequence, was written in 1995 when Sisson was 81. Throughout, his concerns are similiar: identity; mind and body; age; culture; landscape. His judgments of himself, and of humanity generally, are often harsh. "I have no person fit for resurrection," he says in an early poem; in one of the latest he writes, "So fumbling bodies try to make/ Friendship and love as best they can:/ None ever was without mistake/ and lies by woman and by man." Sisson is consistently plain, if not always clear; in these poems, he is rarely adventurous in meter or language. Individual poems--"On My 51st Birthday" and "The Mappemonde"--are outstanding, but the collection overall has a one-note tone and seems somewhat dated and weighty.
