Product Description

Published eight years after "The Man with Night Sweats", written during the midst of the AIDS crisis of the early 1990s, this collection of poetry deals with the survivors, memories and the aftermath.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #598232 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 115 pages

Review
Gunns lengthy and distinguished poetic career includes numerous volumes of poetry and essays, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship and a Lila Acheson Wallace/Readers Digest Fellowship. His acclaimed last book, The Man With Night Sweats (1992), was marked by its wrenching, delicate AIDS elegies. The new collection strikes a tonal balance between an unsentimental awareness of death and a wry but often exuberant account of the everyday tyrannies of love. `Save the word / empathy, sweetheart, / for your freshman essays,` drawls one poem. `In the Post Office` begins by describing a sexual attraction to a stranger, but resolves into a meditation on a friends death. In the poems final lines, elegy and celebration merge. The poet becomes the `survivor, as I am indeed, / recording so that I may later read / Of what has happened, whether between sheets, / Or in post offices, or on the streets.` Perhaps the poems are at their best when they take their greatest risks, as in `Troubadour: Songs for Jeffery Dahmer` in which a catalogue of horrors, including a severed head perched on a shelf `between headcheese and lard,` emerges bathetically from the desire to `find more tangible effects / Than what the memory collects.` Gunns inventive yet controlled formalism, a hallmark of his work, is reminiscent of Renaissance poets like Wyatt and Donne. His liberal use of classical and biblical allusion is never gratuitous, as the sexy, thoughtful cycle about King David that closes the book attests. A lithe and lyrical volume by a master of contemporary poetry. (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Happiness is a Warm Gunn
These poems are at once tender and tough - elegies for dead friends, dissections of the minutiae of modern love, meditations on what Gunn calls the 'devious master of our bodies'. A fine collection, confirming him as one of the best poets of the last half-century.