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.”