Poems of Love And Death

By Paul Gray

Imagine an Auden less reticent about the (male) objects of his affection, or a Philip Larkin shedding his librarian's tweeds for a leather jacket and motorcycle boots. Such imagined metamorphoses might give new readers some sense of the lively pleasures awaiting them in the poetry of Thom Gunn, 70. Those who have watched his distinguished career evolve over nearly half a century need, of course, no such introduction; news that a new book of Gunn's poems has arrived is enough to start their celebrations.

Still, Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 111 pages; $22) offers a splendid introduction for the uninitiated. Almost all of Gunn's virtues are on display here: his playful metrical dexterity, his unflinching celebration both of beauty and of its transience. The subject of love crops up repeatedly in the book's 60 lyrics, but the Boss Cupid of the title is not the chubby winged cherub of popular lore. He is something of a hooligan, "devious master of our bodies," wreaker of joy and havoc: "Love makes the cuckoo heave its foster-siblings/Out of the nest, to spatter on the ground." Pleasure is the other side of loss. In "American Boy" Gunn writes, "Expertly you know how to maintain me/At the exact degree/of hunger without starving. We produce/ What warmth we can."

Advancing age and the AIDS-related deaths of friends--"my everpresent dead"--figure prominently in these poems, but so does Gunn's humorous touch. In "Blues for the New Year, 1997," he notes, with tongue-in-cheek stoicism, "I'm sixty-seven/and have high blood pressure,/and probably shouldn't/be doing speed at all." When a male acquaintance appears at his door, disheveled and asking for a night's rest, the inquiring poet notes: "You don't feel anecdotal,/Give me a weary grin, And eat three plates of Total." Seeing a renowned bar brawler in his decline, Gunn calls him "a shabby old tabby." That description does not fit the poet.

--By Paul Gray