Boss Cupid

(, Main)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

In some respects a sequel to The Man With Night Sweats, Boss Cupid is a memorialising of friends who have died, an anatomy of survival, and a self-portrait of the poet in age. The poems are written under the sign of Cupid, 'devious master of our bodies', but their intimacies are always heard against the sociable human hum of an entire community which Gunn depicts in poems of fluent grace, as formal as they are relaxed.

Reviews

"Imagine an Auden less reticent . . . Almost all of Gunn's virtues are on display here: his playful metrical dexterity, his unflinching celebration of both beauty and its transience."--Paul Gray, "Time"
"Passion in all its obsessive gnarly complexity [serves as] the dominant motif in "Boss Cupid" . . . But in the end, Gunn's great lyric versatility, his edgy wit, and his mastery as a portraitist [underscore] 'the intellect as the powerhouse of love'--and of Gunn's poetics. He is at once the most visceral and cerebral of poets, delineating desire and its fallout with an objective precision."--Carol Moldaw, "The Antioch Review"
"[He has] a formal expertise as polished and apparently effortless as any in contemporary poetry . . . Gunn can choose his form and can fashion, within its enabling limits, breathtaking sweeps through a wide range of fraught feeling."--Michael Thurston, "The Yale Review"

Author Bio

Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent in 1929. After National Service and a short time living in Paris, he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English. He published his first book of poems, Fighting Terms, while he was still an undergraduate. In 1954 he moved to San Francisco and held a one-year Fellowship at Stanford University. He published over thirty books of poetry, including The Man with Night Sweats, which won the Forward Prize for Poetry in 1992, and Boss Cupid (2000). Thom Gunn died in 2004