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Boss Cupid
by Thom Gunn

Boss Cupid

Amazon.com: Hardcover
Barnes & Noble: Hardcover

The Antagonism
to Helena Shire

The makers did not make
The muddy winter hardening to privation,
Or cholera in the keep, or frost’s long ache
Afflicting every mortal nation
From lord to villagers in their fading dyes
-Those who like oxen strained
On stony clearings of the ground
From church to sties.

They sought an utterance,
Or sunshine soluble in institution,
An orthodoxy justified, at once
The Dream and dreamer warmed in fusion,
As in the great Rose Window, pieced from duty,
Where through Christ’s crimson, sun
Shines on your clothes till they take on
Value and beauty.

But carved on a high beam
Far in the vault from the official version
Gape gnarled unchristian heads out of whom stream
Long stems of contrary assertion,
Shaped leaf ridging their scalps in place of hair.
Their origins lost to sight,
As they are too, cast out from light.
They should despair.

What stays for its own sake,
Occulted in the dark, may slip an ending,
Recalcitrant, and strengthened by the ache
Of winter not for the transcending.
Ice and snow pile the gables of the roof
Within whose shade they hold,
Intimate with its salty cold,
To Christ aloof.

Review of the book from Barnes & Noble.

Boss Cupid
Thom Gunn

ABOUT THE BOOK

From The Publisher
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. Thom Gunn, who was born in England in 1929, has lived in San Francisco since 1954. He has received many awards, most recently a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader's Digest award and a MacArthur fellowship. His book The Man with Night Sweats was published in 1993, and his Collected Poems in 1994.

Reviews
The authority, grace, and, not least, the sheer memorableness of Gunn's lines . . . are naturally composed of temperament, diction, attitude, experience, observation - life itself. But they are expressed (especially early and late in the collection) in measures whose suppleness and strength have the effect of effortlessly italicizing whatever the particular poem's burden is. Gunn's joy lifts the heart; but so do his many recent poems on a topic that could hardly be called joyful.