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    Boss Cupid: Poems
    Boss Cupid: Poems
    Boss Cupid: Poems
    Ebook120 pages26 minutes

    Boss Cupid: Poems

    By Thom Gunn

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A great poet's freshest, most provocative book.

    He dreams at the center of a closed system,
    Like the prison system, or a system of love,
    Where folktale, recipe, and household custom
    Refer back to the maze that they are of.
    --from "A System: PCP, or Angel Dust"

    Taste and appetite are contraposed in Boss Cupid, the twelfth book of poems by the quintessential San Francisco poet, who is also the quintessential craftsman and quintessentially a love poet, though not of quintessential love.Variations on how we are ruled by our desires, these poems make a startling and eloquent gloss on wanton want, moving freely from the story of King David and Bathsheba to Arthur Rimbaud's diet to the tastes of Jeffrey Dahmer. As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateApr 1, 2007
    ISBN9780374706050
    Boss Cupid: Poems
    Author

    Thom Gunn

    Thom Gunn (1929–2004) was educated at Cambridge University and wrote his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms (1954), while he was still an undergraduate. He moved to Northern California in 1954 and taught at American universities until his death. His last collection was Boss Cupid (FSG, 2000).

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    Reviews for Boss Cupid

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    • 4/5
      Smart and raw, these poems are about desire in all its' forms, both admirable and frightening. Gunn was one of only a few contemporary poets who are comfortable writing in form, and that versatility shows here. Unlike much contemporary form poetry, though, these poems aren't burdened by restraint--instead, they seem to celebrate life, and love. While some of the poems require some knowledge of biblical lore or classical mythology for a full appreciation of the content, many of them are far more accessible in nature, focusing on scene and character instead of building from other stories. Throughout the poems, however, Gunn's quick rhythms and perfectly formed descriptions are worth reading and re-reading, particularly when his poems are focused in on single short scenes and the results and questions of desire, as is so often the case in this collection.

    Book preview

    Boss Cupid - Thom Gunn

    1

    Duncan

    1

    When in his twenties a poetry’s full strength

    Burst into voice as an unstopping flood,

    He let the divine prompting (come at length)

    Rushingly bear him any way it would

    And went on writing while the Ferry turned

    From San Francisco, back from Berkeley too,

    And back again, and back again. He learned

    You add to, you don’t cancel what you do.

    Between the notebook-margins his pen travelled,

    His own lines carrying him in a new mode

    To ports in which past purposes unravelled.

    So that, as on the Ferry Line he rode,

    Whatever his first plans that night had been,

    The energy that rose from their confusion

    Became the changing passage lived within

    While the pen wrote, and looked beyond conclusion.

    2

    Forty years later, and both kidneys gone;

    Every eight hours, home dialysis;

    The habit of his restlessness stayed on

    Exhausting him with his responsiveness.

    After the circulations of one day

    In which he taught a three-hour seminar

    Then gave a reading clear across the Bay,

    And while returning from it to the car

    With plunging hovering tread tired and unsteady

    Down Wheeler steps, he faltered and he fell

    —Fell he said later, as if I stood ready,

    Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn.

    Well well,

    The image comic, as I might have known,

    And generous, but it turned things round to myth:

    He fell across the white steps there alone,

    Though it was me indeed that he was with.

    I hadn’t caught him, hadn’t seen in

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