The Right Complications

The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler, and Clive Wilmer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, $45.00 cloth.

IN HIS poem “Duncan,” Thom Gunn juxtaposes two versions of a story about companionship. Late in the poet Robert Duncan’s life, his effervescence compromised by illness and fatigue, he collapsed outside after giving a reading at UC Berkeley. In Duncan’s retelling of the story, which Gunn presents first, someone was poised to catch the frail master: “Fell he said later, as if I stood ready, / ‘Into the strong arms of Thom Gunn.’” Gunn lets us have the securing pleasure of those double spondees for a moment, then offers a corrective:

Well well, The image comic, as I might have known, And generous, but it turned things round to myth:

He fell across the white steps there alone, Though it was me indeed that he was with.

Characteristically, Gunn seeks a rawer account, even when it brings him closer to self-criticism: “I hadn’t caught him, hadn’t seen in time, / And picked him up where he had softly dropped, / A pillow full of feathers.” That day he was indeed with his friend Duncan, but could only accompany him up to a point. There is an essential boundary—call it separateness, call it solitude—that the poem insists upon. Even when we are together, each of us remains a distinct self, “separate in the same weather,” as Gunn puts it in the poem “June.”

In one sense, Gunn’s poetry early and late was a technology for discovering and affirming boundaries, for chiseling distinctions. “Remember how their lives were dense / With fine, compacted difference,” he wrote in an epitaph for the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park. Perhaps Gunn’s awareness of boundaries, and the roles made possible by them, developed early out of an instinct for self-protection. Readers of may already be familiar with the dramatic outlines of his life: his mother Charlotte’s suicide when he was fifteen (Thom and his younger brother, Ander, found her body); his surge of self-discovery, including coming out to friends, while in college at Cambridge; the immediate fame brought on by his first book, ; his move from England to California at age twenty-five to follow Mike Kitay, who ended up as his lifelong, though not monogamous, partner (Gunn hated the word and preferred “lover” instead); his quasi-apprenticeship under Yvor Winters at Stanford; his