I’m not well read in poetry. In fact, that’s far too generous. Apart from Philip Larkin and Wallace Stevens—both of whom I love to read—I’ve barely sample any poetry at all. I’m thirty-one. A reader. Almost no poetry.

In the last couple of months, I’ve been reading the little remembered American poet L.E. Sissman. As with Stevens, some of his poems sail right over my head, or “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” as Stevens once rather mysteriously said poetry should do. I’m not sure how much intelligence Sissman is up against in this case.

Those poems of Sissman’s I most enjoy don’t require Talmudic scrutiny, though it helps to have a dictionary at hand. In addition to his poetry and criticism—he published with some regularity in the New Yorker—Sissman was (similar to Stevens in this respect) a businessman. He died at 47 of lymphoma and many of his most affecting poems deal with sickness and death. Among the most bracing is Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite:

“Nowhere is all around us, pressureless,

A vacuum waiting for a rupture in
The tegument, a puncture in the skin,
To pass inside without a password and
Implode us to Erewhon. This room
Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall
An empty elevator clangs its doors,
Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall,
Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air
Outside a trempbling, empty brightness falls
In hunger on those whom it would devour
Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls
And rises silently up the steel stairs
To the eleventh and last floor, where I
Resided on sufferance of authorities
Until my visas wither, and I die.”

One of my favorite passages in Sea Room touches on the fluidity of the past:

“There is a temptation to imagine the past as essentially static and the present as essentially mobile and disrupted. Nothing could be further from the truth. The peopling of the Shiants is only one fragment of an endless chain. That is why this crossing of a potentially alarming sea, at a moment which is picked because the weather is kind and the spring is coming, because the tide running with you and the sun is out, when you can see where you are going and you have everything you need, is one of the deepest of historical experiences. Don’t imagine the past as a place full of catastrophe and horror. This is it’s colour: a chance fairly taken, a sense of happiness in the light of spring.”

I think of that passage in relation to another nautical book I’m in the middle of (I don’t know why two; I’m not interested in sailing) Samuel Eliot Morrison’s Columbus: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Nowadays, Columbus is a hated figure ranked among history’s most portentous villains. Morrison published his biography in 1942, and that's not his prejudice. Later in life, Columbus jumpstarted a grisly slave trade and governed—I’m told—disastrously, but early on he’s simply an adventurer (a visionary, a bit of a crank) taking a fair chance with the wind at his back. I saw his small coffin held aloft in the Seville Cathedral; he can’t have been much over five feet tall. 

I’m reading Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides by Adam Nicolson. Nicolson is the son and grandson of a tribe of writers, the most famous of whom is probably his paternal grandfather, the diplomat Harold Nicolson (author, among other things, of Good Behaviour, being a Study of Certain Types of Civility, 1955). In the early 20C, Adam’s father, Nigel, answered a newspaper ad for the sale of three islands in the Hebrides, the Shiantes, and paid 1,900 pounds for them. When he was twenty-one, Adam inherited the islands like one might age into a trust fund. The upshot, thirty years later, is this unusual, somewhat shaggy book—part memoir and part history, with forays into archeology, botany, boat-making, oceanography, ornithology, even housekeeping. Throughout, Nicolson is a companionable host, showing us around his favorite spots and scrutinizing his beloved birds; dishing rich descriptions without ever boring us (or me). The best travel writer makes one want to visit the place he’s describing. Midway through Sea Room, I really do find myself wanting to stroll across the windswept Shiants, stopping to examine the grassy ruins, to dip—if it's the ripest part of summer and not too chilly—into the peaty pools, and sit and watch the sea birds wing around the cliffs.