Reviews for Selected poems, 1967-1973

The average rating for Selected poems, 1967-1973 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-07-26 00:00:00 Karin Toti that one abt the birth of the baby goat/calf/sheep is so cool i wanted to be a welsh farmer for about 10 seconds

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-26 00:00:00 Eduardo Cruz I'm itching to christen Thom Gunn the "Poet of the Hug." His poems, like hugs, are dependable and steady, marked by cool consistency and mellow humanistic sympathies. He has a few poems about hugs, too---most notably, the aptly titled "The Hug," which wistfully describes a platonic embrace shared by two ex-lovers who are now "just friends." There's also the stately lyric "Baucis and Philemon," which contains the lines "Two trunks like bodies, bodies like twined trunks,/Supported by their wooden hug." The famous poem "The Man With the Night Sweats" features a speaker who has HIV/AIDS: "I am/Hugging my body to me/As if to shield it from/The pains..." And the collection ends with the poem "In Trust," which concerns a romantic relationship in which one of the two partners is always off traveling somewhere: "...As you began You'll end the year with me. We'll hug each other while we can, Work or stray while we must. Nothing is, or will ever be, Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart, But what we hold in trust, We do hold, even apart." Gunn's poems evoke a flint-hard, leather-clad, atheistic universe in which there is no higher power than the human will. Many of Gunn's poems explicitly celebrate the human will: for example, "On the Move," an early poem that lionizes a California motorcycle gang in rhymed iambic pentameter (!), and "To Yvor Winters, 1955," a poem that praises Gunn's writing mentor Winters for using his human will to exert control over his natural surroundings despite the unremitting threat of impending death and entropy. Each of these poems uses the word "will" not once, but twice, within the space of less than 2 pages. In Gunn's anti-Romantic world, what separates the poet from the layman is not passion, a shudder of epiphany, or a lightning-bolt of divine inspiration. Rather, the poet's defining characteristic is his self-disciplined ability to fine-tune his perceptive faculties, his ability to see things exactly as they are. Over and over, in poems like "Waking in a Newly Built House" and "Flying Above California," Gunn foregrounds the virtues of "precision," "accuracy," and "exactitude." In "Considering the Snail," he counsels his readers not to hastily dismiss a poem just because it is not dripping with the overheated fervor that we have been taught to expect from poetry: "The snail pushes through a green night, for the grass is heavy with water and meets over the bright path he makes... What is a snail's fury? All I think is that if later I parted the blades above the tunnel and saw the thin trail of broken white across litter, I would never have imagined the slow passion of that deliberate progress." Gunn's poems are always painstakingly crafted, linear and rational like his agemate Philip Larkin's. Even when Gunn sets out to chronicle a seemingly anarchic event, such as the experience of taking LSD, he never deviates from his core principles of deliberateness and descriptive precision, situating himself as a voice of reason bearing witness to an era of chaos and despair.