Boss Cupid: Poems

A Great Poet's Freshest, Most Provocative Book

Cadets and skinheads, city boys, young Spartans
Wait poised like ballet-dancers in the wings
To join the balance of the corps in dances
Passion has planned. They that have power, or seem to,
They that have power to hurt, they are the constructs
Of their own longing, born on the edge of sleep,
Imperfectly understood.
--from "A Wood near Athens"

This is the twelfth book of poems--the first since The Man with Night Sweats--by the quintessential San Francisco poet, who is also the quintessential contemporary formalist and quintessentially a love poet, though not of quintessential love.
These poems--essentially variations on how we are ruled by our desires--make a startlingly 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 new collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.