Boss Cupid Poems

by Gunn, Thom

• ISBN13: 9780374527716
• ISBN10: 0374527717
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-04-09
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

A great poet's freshest, most provocative book. "He dreams at the center of a closed system, "Like the prison system, or a system of love, "Where folktale, recipe, and household custom"Refer back to the maze that they are of.--from "A System: PCP, or Angel Dust" Taste and appetite are contraposed in "Boss Cupid, 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 collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

Author Biography

Thom Gunn, born in 1929, has received many awards, most recently a Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader's Digest Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. His works include The Man with Night Sweats and Collected Poems.

Table of Contents

1
Duncan	3	(2)
The Antagonism	5	(2)
A Home	7	(2)
My Mother's Pride	9	(1)
The Gas-poker	10	(2)
A Young Novelist	12	(1)
In the Post Office	13	(3)
Postscript: The Panel	16	(2)
The Butcher's Son	18	(2)
An Operation	20	(2)
The Problem	22	(2)
Arethusa Saved	24	(2)
Arethusa Raped	26	(2)
Arachne	28	(1)
Enough	29	(1)
Cat Island	30	(2)
Nights with the Speed Bros.	32	(1)
A System	33	(2)
Sequel	35	(2)
Shit	37	(2)
The Dump	39	(2)
Jokes, etc.	41	(2)
Saturday Night	43	(2)
American Boy	45	(2)
Painting by Vuillard	47	(4)
2
Gossip
Famous Friends	51	(2)
A GI in 1943	53	(2)
Front Bar of the Lone Star	55	(2)
To Donald Davie in Heaven	57	(2)
A Los Angeles Childhood	59	(2)
The Artist as an Old Man	61	(2)
``The little cousin dashed in''	63	(1)
Classics	64	(1)
``7 a.m. in the bar''	65	(1)
Hi	66	(1)
Coffee on Cole	67	(2)
Letters from Manhattan	69	(2)
``Save the word''	71	(1)
Convergence	72	(2)
Blues for the New Year, 1997	74	(1)
Aubade	75	(1)
The Search	76	(1)
Office Hours	77	(2)
``Stories of bar-fights''	79	(2)
``First saw him''	81	(4)
3
Troubadour	85	(8)
Hitch-hiker	85	(2)
Iron Man	87	(1)
The Visible Man	88	(1)
A Borrowed Man	89	(2)
Final Song	91	(2)
Coffee Shop	93	(1)
Rapallo	94	(2)
In Trust	96	(2)
To Cupid	98	(2)
Front Door Man	100	(2)
A Wood near Athens	102	(3)
First Song	105	(2)
Dancing David	107	(6)
God	107	(2)
Bathsheba	109	(2)
Abishag	111	(2)
Acknowledgements and Notes	113