C. H. Sisson Reader
C. H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of the 1950s and 1960s to the Virgilian Somerset poems to the reflective late poems in which Sisson, looking out on the landscape he cherished, sees himself standing at the "last promontory of life". The essays demonstrate the wit, precision and sheer scope of Sisson's writings on literature, culture and politics (he was a senior civil servant before retirement). The editors declare, "No poet has government, and few have had a clearer sense of the role of literature in participating in civic life". An heir to Marvell, Hardy and Edward Thomas, Sisson brings to this essential Englishness the disruptive energies of modernism. Never a comfortable or comforting writer, he is an incisive intelligence and speaks with clarity to the twenty-first-century reader's expectations and discontents.
About the Author
Patrick McGuinness was born in 1968 in Tunisia. In 1998 he won an Eric Gregory Award for poetry from the Society of Authors and his work has appeared in the "Independent", "PN Review", "Poetry Wales", "Leviathan" and other journals and magazines, as well as the anthology "New Poetries II", edited by Michael Schmidt (Carcanet). His first collection, "The Canals of Mars", appeared in 2004. Also for Carcanet, McGuinness has translated "For Anatole's Tomb" by Stephane Mallarme from the French and edited the prose and poems of the Welsh modernist poet Lynette Roberts. He is a fellow of St Anne's College, University of Oxford, where he lectures in French. He lives in Cardiff. In 2009 was made Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes academiques for services to French culture. In 2011 he was made Chevalier des Artes et des Lettres by the French government.
His academic books include "Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre" (Oxford UP, 2000), "Symbolism, Decadence and the fin de siecle" (University of Exeter Press, 2000), and he has edited the Penguin Classics edition of "Against Nature" by J-K Huysmans and T.E. Hulme's Selected Writings for Carcanet. His French Anthologie de la "Poesie symboliste et decadente" is published by Les Belles Lettres (Paris, 2001).
Reviews
Awards won by Patrick McGuinness"
Long-listed, 2011 Wales Book of the Year, English Language Category in The Western Mail (Jilted City)
