When C.H. Sisson was 20, he gave up writing poems. He began once more in his 30s under the stress of war-time, stationed in India. Verse came intermittently, exiguously; the bulk of his early writing in translation ('fishing in other men's waters' he calls it), prose essays and fiction. In the 1960s his poems began to appear.

The London Zoo - his first major book - was published in 1961 when the poet was 47. Since that time his place has grown secure: he is one of the few direct English heirs of the great Modernists, a poet who grounds the enormous energies of that movement in English landscapes, especially those of Somerset, and reconciles the legacies of Eliot and Pound on the one hand and of Hardy and Edward Thomas on the other. The epigraph of his 1984 Collected Poems, which this volume updates and corrects, was from John Gower:

O gentile Engleterre, a toi j'escrits.