Thom Gunn, Poems selected by August Kleinzahler

While we are on the subject of Thom Gunn, it might be a good time to bring forward two previous items-

This review first appeared in Acumen.

Thom Gunn, Poems selected by August Kleinzahler
(Faber ISBN 978 0 571 23069 3, £3.99)

Faber’s ‘Poet to Poet’ series has recently been extended. In the original list, Thom Gunn introduced and selected Ezra Pound and now has August Kleinzahler doing the same for him. As a friend and admirer of Gunn, both urbane and urban poets and each having written essays on the other, Kleinzahler is well qualified for the job as a kindred spirit, in with the out crowd and with a similar post-Beat demeanour but Gunn’s poetry was always much more than a product of sixties culture.
Kleinzahler redresses a perceived imbalance in the widely expressed critical views of Gunn’s career in his selection and explains his choices persuasively in a brilliant introduction. Giving us only two poems from Gunn’s first volume, Fighting Terms, which he describes as ‘top-of-the-line juvenilia’ and not many more from The Sense of Movement, he leaves out many of the long standing anthology pieces that first made Gunn’s name. And where some critics perceived a loss of direction and stylistic uncertainty from the publication of My Sad Captains, in 1961, onwards, Kleinzahler argues that this mature Gunn is the real one whose achievement was ‘extraordinary’.
The selection of poems here is dominated by the pleasure-seeking poems from the 1971 volume Moly and the elegies from the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco from The Man with Night Sweats which appeared in 1992. Even Gunn himself once nominated Moly as his favourite among his own books as it seemed something of a neglected child. And while this re-evaluation of Gunn’s oeuvre is timely and might in time become a new orthodoxy, there are a number of poems missing that established Gunn’s name, maintained what was a more consistent level of achievement throughout his career than this selection suggests and would provide more contrast, demonstrating how far Gunn developed in theme and method from his highly metrical, sometimes bleakly philosophical first poems.
The inclusion of ‘Lofty in the Palais de Danse’, ‘Carnal Knowledge’ and ‘Elvis Presley’, at least, from the 1950’s would illustrate how Gunn’s poetry turned around from a view of human relations as a strategic enterprise, through the discovery of a more humane touch, towards a hedonistic inclusiveness. Kleinzahler bypasses a host of impressive poems from Jack Straw’s Castle, from the political engagement of ‘Iron Landscapes’ to the enduring empathy of ‘Thomas Bewick’, ‘The Cherry Tree’ and ‘Breaking Ground’, to name by no means all of them. And although he makes some good choices from the last volume, Boss Cupid, the omission of ‘The Butcher’s Son’ in which Gunn’s plain language achieves a disarming transcendence is as close to a mistake as a personal selection can make.
Gunn had all but disowned such poems as ‘Lines for a Book’ in which he purported to admire ‘the overdogs from Alexander to those who would not play with Stephen Spender’ and has expressed the view that his best known piece, ‘On the Move’, had come to look stilted and dated but Kleinzahler could hardly paint such a crucial piece out of the picture. However, for him, it is the opening lines of Moly that is the real seminal moment, an instance of transformation both as the theme of the poem and in Gunn’s career. It is one of several points in a gradual process where one can point to the increasing ‘personal abandon’ and relaxation both in form and content which had been noticed by such as Ted Hughes when commenting on the perceived parallels between his poetry and Gunn’s and saying that, for him, Gunn had always been a poet of gentleness.
Of course, we do get the three lyric masterpieces, ‘Tamer and Hawk’, a beautifully controlled love poem about control in the Elizabethan manner; ‘My Sad Captains’, a syllabic farewell to his more metronomic early style and ‘Touch’, a free verse reaching out for understanding of the other but we are then invited to concentrate on Gunn’s sensory adventures in poems like ‘Sunlight’ and ‘The Discovery of the Pacific’, fine poems in themselves but poems in which Gunn intellectualises his response to nature while we are not offered so much of the urban Gunn we would see in ‘Night Taxi’ from the under-represented The Passages of Joy. One is less inclined to argue about the number of poems from The Man with Night Sweats, probably Gunn’s most successful book but the selection, perhaps due to restrictions of space, still misrepresents the range of Gunn’s work.
But Kleinzahler’s close reading and deep appreciation is always evident in his essay, noting exactly why it was that Gunn was identified with other poets that emerged in the 1950’s but clear and instructive on the more important relationships he had with poets from previous centuries, like Donne, Ben Jonson and Fulke Greville. His examination of Gunn’s impersonality in the poems is exemplary, as is the explication of how he used strict metrical poetry to impose form on the elusive, fugitive experience of taking LSD. Kleinzahler admirably does this without using the word ‘objective’ which must have seemed tempting but wouldn’t be right.
He praises the lack of rhetoric, the honesty, the Plain Style so admired in Jonson (‘unembellished, clear’) that in Donald Davie’s words allowed him to recover ‘that phase of English …in which language could register without embarrassment on the one hand the sleazy and squalid , and the other hand the affirmative, the frankly heroic’ and which leads Kleinzahler to call The Man with Night Sweats ‘magisterial’.
Kleinzahler’s account of Gunn is a great tribute and an admirable close interpretation. It is significant for moving the focus within the body of work and thus argues against much of what Kleinzahler sees as a previous misreadings. Gunn’s poetry lends itself well to selection but mainly because each volume contained its quota of memorable poems alongside some that were more ephemeral or are now starting to look rather ‘of their time’ and another book selected on that basis would tell a different story. But Kleinzahler’s book is a cogent and sensitive contribution to the discussion of a poet whose reputation as one of the major poets of the twentieth century can only be enhanced by it.