Reviewing the Reviews: Toibin on Gunn in NYRB

If you didn’t catch it, check out Colm Toibin’s review of the new Selected Poems of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler. I’ve got my problems with the Kleinzahler’s selection (too little of the early work, which often – though not, I have to say, by Kleinzahler in his introduction – gets written off as the tight-assed verse of a young poet from austere, post-imperial Britain, and too much of early seventies stuff, which seems for some readers to stand for the loose, acid-fueled authenticity of a wild man who’s come to accept his penchant for Harleys and black leather), and so would cavil a little over Toibin’s approval of same, but the review’s great. Toibin’s clear and perceptive. More than that, he really gets Gunn. This can be most clearly seen when he turns to exemplary lines and stanzas; he notes, for example, the “mixture of sexual desire and lovely, ambiguous menace” in Gunn’s wonderful “Tamer and Hawk.” But his broader characterization of Gunn’s work, both in individual moments (the Movement-ish verse of the first three books, the experimental work of the Moly period, the elegiac Man with Night Sweats) and in the arc of the career as a whole (as when he illustrates the continuities across the career through five poems chosen for attention by critics in At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn, another book under review in the essay) are also persuasive.

It might be, though, that the comments I most appreciate in Toibin’s review are those that get not at the variety of Gunn’s work but at the catholicity of the poet’s taste. Toibin sets up as the poles between which Gunn moved over the course of his career the antithetical Bay Area figures of critic Yvor Winters and poet Robert Duncan, and he concludes with a comment about how Gunn, especially in a notebook comment about how poetry could “be one’s life at the fullest,” would have met with the approval of both.
He quotes with approval Gunn’s response to an interview question about the impressive span of his poetic affinities: “I’m not surprised . . . that I have sympathies with such a broad range of poetry: I’m surprised that everybody doesn’t.” This attitude is of a piece, I think, with that other uncommon facet of Gunn’s poetics: his resistance to the notion of poetic uniqueness, to the idea that poets should cultivate idiosyncratic and immediately recognizable individual voices. If, like Gunn, more poets made the work about language and its ways of mediating, shaping, warping, breaking and otherwise verbing experience, intellection, and feeling (rather than about their own experience, thoughts, and emotions), the art might recover the widespread strength Gunn himself saw in the work of the Elizabethans. That might be a good thing.