Boss Cupid: Poems by Gunn, Thom

ISBN: 0374115575

Author: Gunn, Thom

Condition: new

Product DescriptionA Great Poet's Freshest, Most Provocative BookCadets and skinheads, city boys, young SpartansWait poised like ballet-dancers in the wingsTo join the balance of the corps in dancesPassion has planned. They that have power, or seem to,They that have power to hurt, they are the constructsOf their own longing, born on the edge of sleep,Imperfectly understood.--from "A Wood near Athens"This is the twelfth book of poems--the first since The Man with Night Sweats--by the quintessential San Francisco poet, who is also the quintessential contemporary formalist and quintessentially a love poet, though not of quintessential love.These poems--essentially variations on how we are ruled by our desires--make a startlingly eloquent gloss on wanton want, moving freely from the story of King David and Bathsheba to Arthur Rimbaud's diet to the tastes of Jeffrey Dahmer. As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this new collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.From Publishers WeeklyGunn, who grew up in England in the '30s and '40s, and has long resided in San Francisco, remains deservedly famous for his poetic chronicles of gay male lust, love, grief and urban life, and for his masterful, unshowy, reader-friendly poems in traditional forms. In his first collection since 1993's lauded The Man with Night Sweats, Gunn treats his readers to lovely stanzaic lyric, amiable Ben Jonson-style epistles, cogent blank-verse essays and taut quatrains; he offers up, too, great descriptions of aging hustlers, versatile bartenders, cool kids, elective affinities and enduring affections, many in a muscular, terse free verse. His interests in disinterested judgment, on sociability and friendship, reappear along with his interest in sex. To his poems about people and places, Gunn adds a brace of short takes on Greek and Biblical stories and legends: Arachne, Arethusa, the loves and lovers of King David. (A brief set of poems in the person of gay serial killer, cannibal and necrophiliac Jeffrey Dahmer are overwhelmed by their subject.) The loose sequence "Gossip"--about a third of the book--consists of quick, memorable, short-lined free-verse portraits: "Frank O'Hara's last lover," the survivor of a brutal "Los Angeles childhood," a Berkeley student "fueled/ on wit and risk/ and Ecstasy." Standalone short poems include a dignified and forceful ode about stained-glass windows and a capsule biography of a man "Raised, he said, not at home but in a Home." While all these ought to satisfy both neophytes and longtime Gunn fans, the latter may be most strongly affected by Gunn's pair of poems on his mother's suicide, a subject on which he has not before published verse: "I am made by her," one poem ends, "and undone." (Apr.)Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.Review"...naturally composed of temperament, diction, attitude, experience, observation - life itself." -- Rachel Hadas, The Yale Review"An exceptional and fascinating poet with a formal range to rival Auden's...a sensuality equal to Ginsberg's." -- Glyn Maxwell, The Times Literary Supplement"[Gunn's] Collected Poems are sane, accessible, impressive in their versification and command of language - testaments to intelligence, warmth, and integrity." -- Richard Tillinghast, The New York Times Book Review"[Gunn's] adventuresome as he grows older . . . Sometimes the poems are so emotionally bald and direct that they are deeply disturbing." -- August Kleinzahler, The Threepenny ReviewAlternate titles for Thom Gunn's new collection, his 12th: Boss Age, Boss Loss, Still Horny After All These Years. For if Cupid rules these pages, he does so jointly with Father Time. -- The New York Times Book Review, William DeresiewiczAbout the AuthorThom Gunn, born in 1929, has received many awards, most recently a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. His works include The Man with Night Sweats (FSG, 1992) and Collected