Gunn, Thom

Boss Cupid: Poems

ISBN: 9780374115579
New York, NY, USA: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. First Edition. Hardcover. “What is that bundle hanging from the ceiling / Unresting even now with constant slight / Drift in the breeze that breathes through rooms at night? / Can it be something, then, that once had feeling, / A girl, perhaps, whose skill and pride and hope / Strangled against each other in the rope? / I think it is a tangle of despair / As shapeless as a bit of woven nest, / Blackened and matted, quivering without rest / At the mercy of the movements of the air / Where half-lodged in, half-fallen from the hedge / It hangs tormented at a season’s edge. / What an exact artificer she had been! / Her daintiness and firmness are reduced / To lumpy shadow that the dark has noosed. / Something is changing, though. Movements begin / Obscurely as the court of night adjourns, / A tiny busyness at the centre turns. / So she spins who was monarch of the loom, / Reduced indeed, but she lets out a fine / And delicate yet tough and tensile line / That catches full day in the little room, / Then sways minutely, suddenly out of sight, / And then again the thread invents the light.”--Thom Gunn, “Arachne,” pg. 28. Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was an English poet whose early work was beloved in his birth country, and later as he moved to San Francisco, became mired in the looser, more free-verse and experimental poetic stylings of the Beat Generation and the Second San Francisco Renaissance. Deeply influenced by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Gary Snyder (b. 1930), and Robert Duncan (1919-1988), Gunn’s work is often remarked on as hybrid: as an English poet who was also a long-time resident of California, his poems combine a respect for traditional poetic forms with an interest in popular topics, such as the Hell’s Angels, LSD, and queer culture. While Gunn wrote most of his early verses in iambic pentameter—a phase when his ambition was “to be the John Donne (1572-1631) of the twentieth century”—his later works assume a variety of forms, including syllabic stanzas and free verse. In all senses a poetic chameleon, Gunn’s inspirations and influences (especially once he mired himself in San Francisco), ranged from Yvor Winters (1900-1968) an archformalist, to Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) one of the most singular poets in the American tradition. Offered today is the 2000 collection of poetry, Boss Cupid. From inside front flap of dust jacket: “Boss Cupid is 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 new collection of Thom Gunn’s is his richest yet.” Truly a clash of his English poetic background, and his Ginsbergian-meets-Snyder San Francisco poetic heresy, Boss Cupid is grounded in the English, iambic meter that Gunn grew out of, while at the same time engaging in free-verse and experimentation. From the collection of Laurence Goldstein (1943-2023), poet, editor, and professor in the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature. Hardcover in unclipped dust jacket. First edition as stated at copyright page, presumed first printing though not explicated as such thereon. Book in very fine condition with only minor wear to fine edges. Interior very fine throughout. Dust jacket in very fine condition with minor wear to fine edges, light smudging to front and back covers, and very slight scratching to same. Very Fine / Very Fine. [Item #8507]

Price: $50.00