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...

 

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