C.H. Sisson, 89; British Poet Wrote on Human Condition

British poet C.H. Sisson, who also was a noted novelist, translator and critic, died Sept. 5 at his home in Langport, England. He was 89. The cause of death was not announced.

Sisson received his first public notice with “The London Zoo,” an anthology of poems published in 1961, when he was in his late 40s. Sisson had written the poems on his own time while working as a civil servant. But he did not regret not being a full-time poet and writer, saying his job “kept me from writing more than I ought to.”

Because he began writing poems in earnest rather late in life, he said it was “no wonder therefore that my themes have often been age, decline and death, with the occasional desperate hopes of the receding man.”

His much-praised “The Trojan Ditch” was published in 1974. Other works include “Christopher Homm,” a novel about working-class life, and “The Case of Walter Bagehot,” a collection of criticism in which he attacked Victorian liberalism.