Building Sandcastles with Thom Gunn

In March 2021, I found myself ordering a copy of The Letters of Thom Gunn, (2021) which had just been published in England by Faber and Faber, through Amazon.uk, thus enabling me to read through it a full year before the book would be published here in the United States. Why the rush? I had known of Gunn’s (1929-2004) poetry for many years though coming late to it, with the publication of The Man with Night Sweats (1992), in which he unsparingly chronicled the devastation that AIDS brought to the gay community of San Francisco where he had lived since the late fifties. The impact of that book made me re-trace his steps, from his early, precocious fame at Oxford, then as part of what became known as “The Movement” (along with Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Donald Davie, and Kingsley Amis), through his move to America where he developed a whole-new persona, one of leather, motorcycles, gay bath houses, LSD, and amphetamines, until AIDS struck, and this became the quintessential elegiac voice of a generation.

So, perhaps, it was not inappropriate for me to be turning to Gunn in the mid of another pandemic, one that uprooted my life in so many ways, though none on a personal level that could compare with the horrors he witnessed and went through.

Gunn’s life had been shaped by another tragedy: his mother committed suicide by gassing herself, leaving her two teenage sons to find her body. It took 47 years for him to put his feelings around that trauma into a poem (“The Gas Poker”), and even then, the event was recounted in a detached third-person allegorical manner. Gunn’s gift was for the mastery of traditional forms, meters, and rhymes. His manner was the antithesis of the confessional poetry of the Fifties (Plath, Lowell) and freeform Whitman-esque lines of Ginsberg’s Howl. Yet it enabled him to write about his homosexuality in a way that would have otherwise been impossible in England in 1950’s, when homosexuality was still a criminal offense. He wrote about doubleness and