Robert Potts
BOSS CUPID by Thom Gunn (Faber &Faber)
Thom Gunn’s poetry has always been celebratory. In the Fifties, as an English poet of the Movement generation, his icons were leather-clad bikers, Elvis Presley, soldiers – the rough, tough men of action – and he famously wrote “I praise the overdog, from Alexander/ To those who would not play with Stephen Spender”, lines that are still a joy today. In the Sixties, Gunn moved to the United States with his lover; what followed was a celebration of San Francisco, the boys, the bathhouses, the drugs, the city itself.
It has been a wide-ranging celebration employing a generous breadth of forms, from imitations of 17th-century poets through syllabics and free verse. The epidemic of the Eighties – the lives cut short, the gutting of a joyful extended family – is rendered in The Man with Night Sweats (1992), one of the outstanding volumes of the decade: elegaic, beautiful, rigorous and resolutely affirmative even in the face of grief.
At Gunn’s age, and with the epidemic barely tamed, the elegies have necessarily continued. His latest book opens with a poem for the American poet Robert Duncan, exquisitely precise (almost old-fashioned) in form and diction, ending with the famous image from Bede which Gunn has employed before, the swift flight of a swallow through a medieval feasting hall.
Gunn can be an unequivocally modern poet, but he knows the value of established images, icons and forms; the way his conversational voice entwines itself with verse forms hundreds of years old testifies to a facility few poets possess. Gunn uses form less as a restraint than as a vehicle for proper care.
Wordsworth declared that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”. Gunn does not seem to care much for “the spontaneous overflow” (he has wittily glossed it as “Wet dreams, wet dreams, in libraries congealing”), but his poetry is indeed that of emotion recollected in tranquillity.
In his radio interviews with James Campbell (now usefully published in book form), Gunn says, “Yes, I’m a cold poet, aren’t I?” In comparison with the terrible urgency of Ted Hughes or Sylvia Plath (“the last person I want to be”), Gunn renders his subjects in controlled stanzas and reflective, hard-staring phrases, and revivifies them in that way. You feel the pertinent emotion without having it forced upon you.
Tranquil recollection, of course, is not always immediately possible. Two poems in the present volume are about Gunn’s mother, and her suicide when he was a teenager. They have taken (the poet himself seems surprised by the fact) 48 years to write with sufficient distance. It is typical of Gunn’s generosity of spirit that he immediately uses his experience of grief and recovery in relation to friends who have lost loved ones.
Boss Cupid continues to find sources of celebration in the midst of grief – survival, recovery – even though these are, inevitably, tinged with guilt. There are frequent acknowledgments here that age and the times have rendered him more often a watcher rather than a participant. He is haunted by “my / dear, my ever-present dead”.
In Boss Cupid a poetry founded on martial imagery (his first book was called Fighting Terms), which at times has considered rigorously the isolated self with an almost Nietzschean delight in individual strength, has found new vocabularies to treat the play-offs between the self (survivor, recorder) and the wider community.
The Nietzschean strain is still there (a consideration of lust for the young leads him to parody Keats: “Power/ as beauty, beauty/ power, that / is all my cock knew or /cared to know …”), but there are, more often, metaphors of settlement, negotiation, community, even democracy. The tension is maintained, one undercutting the other; thus Gunn truly celebrates “the sexual New Jerusalem” of the Seventies while elegising it, as with this Aids memorial: “Walker within this circle, pause./ Although they all died of one cause,/ Remember how their lives were dense / With fine compacted difference.”
Boss Cupid treats its various loves – and modes of love – with admirable breadth and generosity. Gunn moves so fluently between the general and the individual, the celebratory and the serious, the erotic and the mortal, without unbalancing; these poems complement each other exquisitely, though each can stand alone.