Michelucci - The Poetry of Thom Gunn

Stefania Michelucci, The Poetry of Thom Gunn (McFarland)

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Judging this book by its excellent cover, one might be surprised to find that it makes only one passing reference to Thom Gunn's perfect early lyric, Tamer and Hawk. Instead of using Gunn's 'best' poems, the study makes most use of poems that provide the best fit with themes that Prof. Michelucci finds central to Gunn's ideas and so, in a way, it is a book less about the poetry of Thom Gunn than the intellectual ideas behind it. It consists of lengthy exegeses of the ideas in the poems rather than the way they are made into poems. These accounts are then augmented by extracts from other critics, sometimes the early study by Alan Bold that looked at Gunn and Hughes in turn which was valuable at the time but might have been superseded by other critiques by now.

Having also apparently accepted the idea, in August Kleinzahler's brilliant essay in his selection published by Faber, that the first two Gunn books, Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement, were 'apprenticeship' books, it refers back to these poems throughout as if those ideas were never really left behind.

It is surprising that having agreed that Positives, the collaboration with the photographs of his brother, Ander, was not his most successful poetry by any means that a chapter is devoted to it.

Gunn's poetry lends itself more than most to a chronological assessment because its thematic and stylistic development are so clear and closely linked and so although it is welcome and quite ambitious to make connections between the earliest and later work, the sense of development in this account is made partial.

Perhaps that is right. It is as much a part of Gunn's highly intellectual early verse that makes these interpretations of them somewhat heavy going and the reason it is now being seen as apprenticeship poetry is at least in part due to the rather stilted idiom of some of it. But Gunn is as fluent and verbally dextrous as any in his finest pieces and so it seems slightly peculiar to me that The Allegory of the Wolf Boy is made central to this study as opposed to, say, Touch.

But it raises an interesting question about what aspects of a poet's work are the crucial ones. Is it, in fact, the framework of ideas and a scrutiny of what might be the 'world-view' or is it the practice of translating them into poems.

Prof. Michelucci, in making so much use of the Wolf Boy poem, plus Waking in a Newly Built House, for example, makes Gunn into a poet of metamorphosis second only to Ovid and makes a perceived and obvious theme of 'duality' an ongoing motif throughout his work. And it isn't all sweetness and light, either, as her identification of 'the body' as a recurrent theme throughout the oeuvre includes the nightmares of the prison of Jack Straw's Castle and the Jeffrey Dahmer poems.

But none of any of this is necessarily a bad thing. It is only that it isn't much like the book on Gunn I left unfinished in 1999. There is a great deal to admire in its scholarly and thorough approach. The opening chapter on the Movement and the biographical outline are exemplary and the interview at the end contains much sense and wisdom from the poet. He points out that his generation, with Larkin and Hughes, were not reacting against previous generations of English poets but that they 'disregarded' the leading figures, just 'not taking any notice' of them. He is not interested in theory, or Language poets, or confessional ones. He insists on poems not working towards generalization but being about specifics. It is brilliant and common sense stuff until one sees him still in sympathy with Beat poets and, it has to be said, spending half of his teaching career on creative writing programmes, of which he makes a guarded defence.

He is also glad to be labelled 'Anglo-American' and thought to have slightly alienated critics and readers on both sides of the Atlantic by being so, the tremendous artistic advantages of not being associated easily with other poets in an identifiable group having worked against his marketability in all but the most discriminating places. But, good for him, that seems to worry his admirers more than it worries him and he genuinely seems not to have pursued a career as such, which must be a luxury afforded only to the brightest and best or the most avowedly amateur.

The tradition he belongs to is a much longer one, with inter-textual references to Donne, The Hug referring us back to The Extasie, or Old Meg to Keats' Meg Merrilies, the more obvious echoes of Yeats and Shakespeare and even Stephen Spender.

Stefania Michelucci has provided a generous and worthwhile account of Thom Gunn, the first 'full-length' such to appear in print. Gunn's strength might in the end turn out to come from the seemingly problematic point that he ultimately was differentiated from all schools and movements but was also a poet that brought many disparate threads of poetry together, from the Elizabethan to the formally iambic, through the syllabics of American modernism to a free verse that expressed various achieved freedoms. My one last big surprise in her book is that Prof. Michelucci doesn't make use of perhaps Gunn's finest late poem, The Butcher's Boy, that relates the joy of a father reunited with his son, thought lost in the war, which could be made to stand for what his best poetry does,

Like a light within the light

That he turned everywhere.