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Thom Gunn, Boss Cupid. London: Faber, £7.99.

Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell. London: Between the Lines, £10.

     “Yes”, Thom Gunn muses at one point in the course of his extended conversation with James Campbell (who has just compared the “point-zero” temperature of his poetry with Ted Hughes’s “hot-blooded” writing) “I’m a cold poet, aren’t I?” But it all depends on what we take from a term like “cold”, as Gunn’s slightly quizzical pitch seems to imply: he goes on to recall how he and Hughes “were both considered to be violent”, and cites Hughes’s own firm disagreement with such an estimate, in his statement that “Thom Gunn’s is the poetry of tenderness, not violence.” “I greatly appreciated that”, Gunn adds, “because I think it’s true”. 

     There is a firmness, or a finality, in this way of dealing with the matter; Gunn insists on his distance from “violence” – a distance all the more convincing, perhaps, for having been recognised by someone whose own poetic violence was so pervasive – and simply leaves it there. In conversation, as in poetry, Gunn seldom allows anything redundant to survive; the imperatives of clarity and economy mean that, while there is little slack there is also, on occasion, little comfort: hence, maybe, his supposedly “cold” writing. Properly, Gunn makes the point that this is not the same thing as “violence”, but he does not go on to maintain that, in fact, it is this very coldness of attitude in poetry that is the only way in which “tenderness” can have either a meaning or a use. Of course, there is no need for Gunn to make such a point;  the poetry has proved it already, and such observations would be therefore both beside and far removed from that point.

     It is, too, a profoundly unfashionable idea, so far from favour now as to be almost an affront:  how, after all, can something so conventionally “human” as poetry try to find “tenderness” in the fridge? Gunn’s instinctive position owes something to the kind of readers of poetry who tend to be dismissed by the critically correct, and it comes as no surprise to hear of his lasting admiration for F.R. Leavis and Yvor Winters:

He [Leavis] was not, probably, a very likeable person, but he had a very interesting view of literature, seeing it as a part of life. That was what was so wonderful. Literature is not like a fine wine that you taste and judge by comparison with other wines. You compare a book to a person, for example, or to an action. This was what later attracted me about another slightly difficult critic, Yvor Winters. He too considered a poem as an action. And it is, of course; it’s not just a decoration.

That “of course” would not go down well everywhere (just as Leavis’s characteristic “This is so, isn’t it?” can be derided now as somehow authoritarian and crypto-fascist); still less would Gunn’s insistence on poetry’s function as life and action, rather than “discourse”, please those committed to the decorative aspects of literature. From that perspective, Gunn’s own poetry is cold indeed, a matter of form and style alone. Here, oddly, the poet is able to fall foul of both extremes of contemporary taste: those who like their poetry to be accommodatingly attuned, a kind of complaisant social exchange, find much of Gunn forbidding and stiff; while those for whom poetry’s most important place is in the climate-controlled intellectual surroundings of the seminar-room tend to regard Gunn as the representative of a discredited (and, they suppose, a vanished) world.

     But good poetry is never in fact, or for long, the same thing as warm and open contemporary sociability; nor is it – as we should all know by now – primarily an opportunity for academic speculation or dogma. So what is good poetry? Gunn’s Boss Cupid makes it possible to answer that question in the only way it can be answered, by specific example; some of the volume’s poems are amongst Gunn’s very best, and show the kind of inevitability in their trajectories, in their forms, statements, and control, that necessarily silences all but the most modish or hard of hearing critical responses. ‘The Gas-poker’ is already a widely-praised poem in Gunn’s new book, but it can’t really be praised enough; the whole piece is a stunningly maintained example of the most difficult and demanding balances, both in terms of poetic form and (as it happens) of memory and pain; but the poem itself is neither an exercise in form nor an essay in self-therapy. The opening stanza wastes nothing:

Forty-eight years ago
– Can it be forty-eight
Since then? – they forced the door
Which she had barricaded
With a full bureau’s weight
Lest anyone find, as they did,
What she had blocked it for.

There is an extraordinarily exact tension in the relation between “anyone” and “they”: the conventionally conversational “Can it be forty-eight/ Since then?” cues an apparently casual use of “they” in “they forced the door” – “they” must be the functionaries from an impersonal, or at least a not personally connected world, who stand somewhere on the other side of the self-created, and final, isolation of one person’s suicide. “They” could be “anyone”; and the barricading is to ensure that “they” are, indeed, an unknown “anyone”. But “Lest anyone find, as they did,/ What she had blocked it for” turns things around: “as they did” rhymes very exactly with “barricaded”, and this stresses “they” over “did” – “they” are not just anyone, but are altogether closer to the voice that can ask “Can it be forty-eight/ Since then?”, and the second stanza begins by explaining that “She had blocked the doorway so,/ To keep the children out”. Gunn’s third and fourth stanzas focus on the children, whose bewilderment coexists with practicality, so that “They who had been her treasures/ Knew to turn off the gas,/ Take the appropriate measures,/ Telephone the police”.

     The children in ‘The Gas-poker’, then, both behave like “anyone” and experience shock and loss in the way that anyone who is not just anyone might do. Gunn’s final stanza goes back inside the barricaded room for a single image:

One image from the flow
Sticks in the stubborn mind:
A sort of backwards flute.
The poker that she held up
Breathed from the holes aligned
Into her mouth till, filled up
By its music, she was mute.

Another reversal, or going backwards, is put into action here; Gunn manipulates the image through the stanza with a Metaphysical precision, where the shape of the verse is aligned with the working intricacy of a thought. Poetry like this does not flinch; but this is not to say that it is anything less than adequate to the stark pain it remembers. Sorrow, as Gunn understands, does not sit apart from the complexity and contingency of its occasions; the achievement of ‘The Gas-poker’ is to match this understanding with form, and to make the poem’s movement one with the backwards and forwards movements of the children who “went to and fro/ On the harsh winter lawn/ Repeating their lament”. “Forty-eight years ago” sounds a note that tolls through the entire poem, and each subsequent stanza begins with it: “She had blocked the doorway so”, “The children went to and fro”, “Knew all there was to know” and, finally, “One image from the flow”. This is, perhaps, the poem’s equivalent in sound to the children “repeating their lament,/ A burden, to each other”, but it is counterpointed by the changes of rhyme that follow in each stanza, where each concluding line finds its rhyme from the word ending the third line, and far enough to be almost, but not quite, out of earshot. In a way reminiscent of Hardy at his best, the formal achievement here is at one with the poem’s emotional force.

     The register of ‘The Gas-poker’ is not, of course, Gunn’s sole register; and it is likely that, even in its very poise, the poem already implies that such a register can never be either final or complete. It is this which, in a period when elegy has become probably the dominant mode in contemporary poetry, makes Gunn a real (as opposed to a reflex) elegist. The Man With Night Sweats, Gunn’s last collection, was heavy with grief, but weighted also with the ironies and discomforts that mark elegiac attempts at getting on speaking terms with death; in Boss Cupid, too, the poetry often reaches the kinds of human impasse which only the genuine elegist can own up to or negotiate. ‘In the Post Office’ remembers visiting the dying lover of a dead friend, who, up to the end, perceives the visitor as an enemy and rival:

“You can come in now,” said the friend-as-nurse.
I did, and found him altered for the worse.
But when he saw me sitting by his bed,
He would not speak, and turned away his head.
I had not known he hated me until
He hated me this much, hated me still.
I thought that we had shared you more or less,
As if we shared what no one might possess,
Since in a net we sought to hold the wind.
There he lay on the pillow, mortally thinned,
Weaker than water, yet his gesture proving
As steady as an undertow.  Unmoving
In the sustained though slight aversion, grim
In wordlessness.  Nothing deflected him,
Nothing I did and nothing I could say.
And so I left. I heard he died next day.

The plainness of Gunn’s couplets points up the intractable nature of the situation: one death contests the meaning of another, and refuses assent to the visitor’s possession of a particular memory. The task facing Gunn here is to accommodate this refusal, to keep it alive, without succumbing to the temptation to transcend it through sentiment or self-contemplation. In this, the bareness of the language works perfectly alongside the couplets’ inexorable building-up; at the same time, the poem’s larger narrative shape complicates matters, since the whole recollection is set within the frame of another kind of memory, that of lustful contemplation of a young man in a post office. In a poem about the difficulty of human endings, the experiences remembered have momentum but no closure or finality. The couplets add up and add up, and they collude with a continuing process of survival:

I have imagined that he still could taste
That bitterness and anger to the last,
Against the roles he saw in me because
He had to: of victor, as he thought I was,
Of heir, as to the cherished property
His mother – who knows why? – was giving me,
And of survivor, as I am indeed,
Recording so that I may later read
Of what has happened, whether between sheets,
Or in post offices, or on the streets.

Being faithful to memory is one thing;  remaining faithful to the truth of continuance as well is all the more difficult for its being apparently beside the point of loss; and yet it is just this which makes up elegy’s condition and element. Gunn’s ‘A Young Novelist’, with its byline “whose first book was published in the same week that his lover died”, ends by juxtaposing a situation in which “He doesn’t know which way to turn;/ Each stroke of fortune will infect the other;/ Each is a thought of terrible unrest’ with a quite different aftermath - one which makes sense when we remember that ‘The Gas-poker’ was the volume’s preceding poem:

Once on his way to school a schoolboy surfaced
From all of loss to one cold London street
And noticed minute leaves, they were soft points,
Virgin-green, newly eased out of black twigs,
And didn’t know, really, what to make of them;
Then turning back to it found he no longer
Knew what to make of the other thing, despair.

The daring, and rightness, of the deliberate rhythmic near-stall in “And didn’t know, really, what to make of them” are remarkable: as the poem’s rhythm picks up again, Gunn makes the idea of resumption itself credible, and makes convincing the notion of starting again with “despair” now somehow a thing apart, now at length “the other thing”, where it had once been everything there was.

     Boss Cupid is by no means only a book of elegies, and it might be called more accurately a book of what comes after elegy: the volume’s second section, entitled ‘Gossip’, is a series of  deceptively offhand, but brilliantly executed, sketches from life, and about life. This holds true even for pieces like ‘To Donald Davie in Heaven’, where literary allusion and warm, ironic and affectionate humour construct one of Gunn’s most luminous and affirming poems. But Gunn’s capacity for economy of expression and observation is just as effective when it treats altogether bleaker matter. ‘A Los Angeles Childhood’ finds a bare register for memories of abuse: “Sometimes,/ When his car was there but hers wasn’t/ I’d hide and not go home,/ But sometimes I would”. The end of the poem makes spare and laconic tone into something that can be troublingly resonant:

Me, I couldn’t spell,
so she made me kneel in a corner
on kidney beans. I spell words
just like they sound, I get understood.
First chance I got, I enlisted.
She’s still alive.
I don’t go see her.

In its way, this poem too is all about emerging on the other side of trouble, and being able to get by on what might look like modest means – whether these are expressive, material, or emotional in nature. Gunn’s speakers in some of these poems thrive on various kinds of bare minimum, and in this respect at least they are at one with the poet’s more complicated kinds of economy. Thus, when ‘The Search’ uses the chopped shorthand of a personal ad, Gunn coaxes out of the verse an epigrammatic sharpness, so that the poem’s wit consists partly in its brilliant and ironic miniaturizing of the other poems’ manners:

                   Let’s do
lunch and each other.
Leave #.  Movie stars
OK, insensitivity a big +.

The hard edge of self-regard is being satirised, perhaps, but in general Gunn still avoids wasting resources on colluding with the supposed sensitivities of others: “Save the word/ empathy, sweetheart,/ for your freshman essays./ Doesn’t it make/ a rather large/ claim?” And, in more conventional form, in the lines ‘To Another Poet’:

You scratch my back, I like your taste it’s true,
But, Mister, I won’t do the same for you,
Though you have asked me twice. I have taste too.

This has the authentic Jonsonian ring to it, even though there is a risk that it is just this tonal accuracy which might blunt the lines’ (necessary) impact on the contemporary world of literary hacks, for whom it will be no more than a pastiche of the kind of writing they have seldom encountered and never enjoyed or understood. 

     While a great deal of Boss Cupid explores and exemplifies the discipline of making do, and of pushing on with exiguous resources that look barely enough, another aspect of the book is alert to the senses in which enough will never do, and the kinds of demand which can never finally have enough of what they desire. Cupid is, after all, this volume’s presiding deity and “boss”: here, as before, Gunn’s combination of technical control with uncontrollable matter produces a curious and haunting kind of frisson. The most extreme case of this is in the sequence of ‘Songs’ voiced for the serial murderer (and part-time cannibal) Jeffrey Dahmer, but others among these poems are also case-studies in Cupid’s ways and means: two in particular, ‘Rapallo’ and ‘In Trust’ are outstanding love poems, simultaneously unillusioned and celebratory. More generally, Gunn’s writing is just as adequate to the puzzlements of sex as it is to the perplexities of grief; these combine magnificently in ‘Saturday Night’, an elegy for and a celebration of the San Francisco bath-houses, which ends with a vision of collapse:

Mattresses lose their springs.  Beds crack, capsize,
  And spill their occupants on the floor to drown.
Walls darken with the mold, or is it rash?
   At length the baths catch fire and then burn down,
And blackened beams dam up the bays of ash.

It is all (maybe uniquely) unmoralized ruin, just as the other stretches of damage and loss in Boss Cupid are also, in their way, seen somewhere on the other side of commentary, sentiment, or easily-imposed coherence. Most poetry registers paradox in lame rehearsal; Gunn’s poetry about love and desire embodies and inhabits the paradox: as he puts it in ‘A Wood near Athens’, “It is all ridiculous, ridiculous,/ And it is our main meaning”. This is so, isn’t it? At their best, these poems are actions, and actions of fine and exemplary sensitivity, subtlety, and resource. Only a very few poets now writing are capable of producing a volume as strong as Boss Cupid; there are fewer still who can match Gunn’s capacity, now abundantly in evidence,  for combining tenderness with truth.