Just fifteen years ago, to less public acclaim than one would wish, a surpassingly innovative and accomplished first book of poetry, Dying: An Introduction, was published by Atlantic-Little, Brown. Its author, L. E. Sissman, the creative director of the Boston office of a national advertising firm, had recently turned forty. He’d been “introduced” to dying in the fall of 1965 when he learned he had lymphatic cancer. In 1976, eight years after that first volume’s appearance (he’d published two other books of verse in the interim, and a collection of essays), Sissman was dead.[1]

An emphasis on dates and durations is appropriate in Sissman’s case for two reasons. Perhaps because he sharply sensed his days were numbered, Sissman was ever a writer preoccupied with time—its vastest designs (that pet subject of poets, who seem to feel so acutely the pinching contrast between human mortality and inorganic eternity) as well as its little building blocks, the dated days and hours. With extraordinary frequency his poems include dates or times in their titles, often of such specificity as “December 29, 1949” or “Three-ten, et seq.” Sometimes such exactitude immediately justifies itself, as where a war or other world event is commemorated, but often the significance is wholly personal, as where “January 22, 1932” recalls his first dim glimpse of New York as a four-year-old. A reader seeking to explain this precision might plausibly deem it only one manifestation of a wider meticulousness, for Sissman was a poet