elegantly dressed thom gunn

Thom Gunn!

The elegant, rock-&-roll poster boy for poetry. I've had a little thing for him ever since I was a kid - I remember seeing his books in the houses of my parents' friends, like the Golds, who were photographers and had an Anglophile book collection, in the senventies. I was fascinated by his name, which seemed to inhabit its own spelling system with its rogue "h" and the double "n", and (admittedly) I think by the beautiful typographical covers of the English Faber editions. "Thom Gunn" seemed an infinitely authoritative representative of something I had yet to discover.

And because of this I missed the particular discovery of Thom Gunn that was formative for so many poets of a certain generation. I've read accounts where poets recall their first reading of Gunn with something like awe, saying thyey felt he gave them permission to be themselves on paper. He wrote graceful poetry with both rhyme and metre - something that, as has been said, never really went out, and with which in any case the mass of English poets have always been far more comfortable than the Americans among whom he played out most of his career - but he did it differently, he was sexy, he wrote about Elvis, and after he moved to San Francisco he lived (and wrote) a wild (yet intellectual) life full of homosexual excess. He and Ted Hughes (paired by Faber and both at their peak in the sixties and seventies) were the sexiest poets to come along in a while, I guess.

By the time I read him I was just saying, "so this is what it's all about..." I've always found it interesting that the New Formalists don't showmore interest in him.

Anyway, there I was, and I've always loved him for his warmth, his lack of vanity, his poetic immediacy and of course the beautiful sounds and technical bedazzlement of his poems. When he died three years ago today, it didn't seem possible that he was 74 - technically, "old enough" - so "not-old" did he seem, for all that he'd been around - well - forever! My forever, anyway.

Love 'im.

Here are the obituaries from the Telegraph and the Guardian (with a wonderful picture).

And here's a poem that seems apt, from his last collection, Boss Cupid:

To Donald Davie in Heaven

I was reading Auden - But I thought
you didn't like Auden, I said.
Well, I've been reading him again,
and I like him better now, you said.
That was what I admired about you
your ability to regroup
without cynicism, your love of poetry
greater
than your love of consistency.

As in an unruffled fishpond
the fish draw to whatever comes
thinking it something to feed on

there was always something to feed on
your appetite unslaked
for the fortifying and tasty
events of reading.

I try to think of you now
nestling in your own light,
as in Dante, singing to God
the poet and literary critic.

As you enter among them,
the other thousand surfaced glories
- those who sought honour
by bestowing it -
sing at your approach
Lo, one who shall increase our loves.

But maybe less druggy,
a bit plainer,
more Protestant.