James Campbell at The New Criterion:
I first met Thom Gunn in 1997 and last saw him in London in 2003, a year before his death. I’m not fool enough to contradict Nott and his well-informed witnesses, and maybe I was simply blinded time and again by Gunn’s charisma, but to me he was not the desolate figure who moves through the dismal second half of A Cool Queer Life. We sat for an entire afternoon on our first encounter in his house on Cole Street, me with his cat on my lap (immortalized in the poem “In Trust” from his last book, Boss Cupid) and a bottle of cheap white wine between us. (It had to be cheap: refined in so many ways, Gunn loved vulgarity in drink and music. “I like loud music, bars, and boisterous men,” he wrote in The Passages of Joy.) It counts as one of the most memorable conversations of my life. At intervals, he would rise to take down a book from the shelf, to read a poem in order to illustrate or affirm an enthusiasm. I remember him saying that he had a direct entry into poetry. Where he encountered barriers, he usually knew how to overcome them. He believed that Boss Cupid would be his final book, but his illuminating introduction to a short selection from Ezra Pound made in 2000 proves that his “writing life” continued in other forms.
more here.
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