L.E. Sissman died in 1976 leaving nearly three hundred pages of closely typed verse, all of it written in a twelve-year period at the end of his life. Although some of it invites the harshest strictures, the sheer volume of his output requires that considered attention be paid to it. His reputation has recently become substantially more widespread than it was before his death, partly because of a raft of poems published posthumously in the New Yorker. The phenomenal amount of verse produced in the full flood of his creative decade, and the publication of much of it in the New Yorker, have led to the general impression that his muse was possessed of a heart pregnant with celestial fire. And his early death at what appeared to be the peak of his writing career, together with his own poems about his impending death from Hodgkin's disease, has...