Collected Poems
By Thom Gunn
Farrar Straus Giroux, 495 pages, $35
In recent years, no poet in America has been more highly honored than Thom Gunn. In 1991, he was one of the first recipients of the Lila
Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. In 1992, his remarkable collection of poems “The Man With Night Sweats” appeared to nearly universal praise. In 1993, he received a MacArthur fellowship. And now his “Collected Poems” is sure to bring him even more adulation.
To those of us who’ve followed Gunn’s career, the wonder of his sudden popularity is that it didn’t happen sooner. Unfortunately, from his first book, “Fighting Terms” (1954), to his 1982 collection, “The Passages of Joy,” he has been the sort of poet whom everybody knows about but few read.
An Englishman who has lived in San Francisco since the mid-1950s, Gunn has always been a poet difficult to pigeonhole. His plain diction, intellectual rigor and traditional meters reminiscent of the poetry of Donne and Marlowe, not to mention Shakespeare’s songs and sonnets, have made him seem too English to his American readers, and since the ’60s, his interest in William Carlos Williams and his own free verse experiments, not to mention his involvement with the countercultural world of drugs and sexual liberation, have made him seem too American to his English ones.
His marginal status has been further reinforced by his homosexuality, a subject about which he has frankly written long before it was fashionable to do so. My sense is that for every heterosexual reader put off by Gunn’s affiliation with the gay culture there’s a homosexual reader who finds Gunn’s range of interests and concerns too general and insufficiently ideological to compel anything more than mild respect. Thus he has likewise seemed too gay for straights, and too straight for gays.
Like many English and American poets who began to publish in the 1950s, Gunn’s early work is exclusively formal. Yet two qualities distinguish those early poems from the impersonal, well-wrought urns so many of his contemporaries were producing: his preoccupation with extreme and often violent experience, and the tough, muscular bad boy pose he assumes.
As the title of his first book, “Fighting Terms,” implies, these are combative poems in which self and other, and self and world stand in uneasy opposition. The people he writes about-motocycle gang members, soldiers and toughs of one kind or another-are all outsiders, defining themselves against societal norms. Denied the comforts of received ideas, moral or religious, they forge whatever values that sustain them from their experience alone.
Like the motorcylists in “The Sense of Movement,” the people Gunn admires move existentially through a “valueless world,” in which no absolute exists “in which to rest.” Or as Merlin puts it in “Merlin in the Cave,” “I must act, and make/ The meaning in each movement that I take.”
All human relations, including sexual ones, are imagined in terms of war, subjection, conquest and defeat. The jaded loners of these early poems demystify romantic pretense, they “kill the easy things that others like/ To teach them that no liking can be lasting” (“Lofty in the Palaiss de Danse”). Why, they ask, “pretend/ Love must accompany erection?/ This is a momentary affection,/ a curiosity bound to end” (“Modes of Pleasure”). The same antagonism obtains between the self and the natural world: “Now we’re at war: whichever wins/ My human will cannot submit,/ To nature, though brought out of it” (“The Unsettled Motocyclist’s Vision”).
Early and late, Gunn conceives of human experience as “cross bred”-as a tentative, always changing mixture of irrational instinct and rational choice, consciousness and unconscious energy, individual desire and social pressure. But the implacable oppositions in the early work become in the ’60s and ’70s mutually entailing possibilities. In “My Sad Captains” (1961), “Moly” (1971) and “Jack Straw’s Castle” (1975) images of unity and balance come to outnumber those of angry self-detachment. Poems in syllabic and free verse measures now appear alongside those in rhyme and meter. And throughout these books, in both the free and formal verse, there’s a greater intimacy of tone, and a keener interest in natural detail: “The snail pushes through a green/ night, for the grass is heavy/ with water and meets over/ the bright path he makes, where rain/ has darkened the earth’s dark….”
If the person implied by the language of these poems is often drawn to those momentary states of being in which the self “belongs to what it captures,” “giving itself to what created it,” (or as he says in “Touch,” to those “dark/ wide realms where we/ walk with everyone”), he nonetheless remains, even at his most ecstatic, never entirely possessed by what he celebrates. His ambition is never merely to present experience in all its fresh immediacy but rather to judge and understand it in relation to the rest of life. This is why Gunn so often articulates the most extreme experiences in the tightest forms, and why in his free verse poems concerned with psychic dissolution his language remains unadorned and chaste.
There is, in other words, always a creative tension in his best poems between form and content. Even as he seems to abandon himself to some simplifying intensity, as in “The Geysers,” the control implicit in the management of form and style insists upon the value of the discriminating mind. As a poet, Gunn remains committed to the whole of consciousness even when, as a man, he desires to dissolve into a part of it.
This inclusiveness is nowhere more apparent than in the last two books, “The Passages of Joy” and “The Man With Night Sweats.” In the more recent poems, the idealism of the ’60s and ’70s (while not renounced) is qualified by a keener awareness of the sleazy underside of the countercultural world. Though Gunn has always had a prurient weakness for the kinky side of things, in poems such as “Sweet Things,” “Bally Power Play,” “Donahue’s Sister,” “Adultery,” “The Victim” and “Transients and Residents” the sensational or sleazy nature of the subject matter is never indulged in for its own sake but always incites a remarkable depth of speculation.
In “The Man With Night Sweats,” the elegies for friends and acquaintances who died of AIDS are among the most profound and unforgettable poems I have read in many years. As in the elegiac tradition in which every song of lament is simultaneously a song of praise, poems such as “Lament,” “Words for Some Ash,” “The J Car” and “To a Dead Graduate Student” memorialize with humor as well as sorrow the individuals they mourn. In their formal measures and rich austerity of diction, they reach back into the literary past even as they confront unflinchingly the horrors and perplexities of contemporary life. Here is the end of “Lament”:
“You never thought your body was attractive,/ Though others did, and yet you trusted it/ And must have loved its fickleness a bit/ Since it was yours and gave you what it could,/ Till near the end it let you down for good,/ Its blood hospitable to those guests who/ Took over it by betraying it into/ The greatest of its inconsistencies/ This difficult, tedious, painful enterprise.”
