There is no street in Christendom more ultra-Male than Jermyn Street in London, although the whorehouse is no longer there. But all the other services dear to the male body are in eloquent supply—the hatters, the shirtmakers, the booters, the perfumeries and tobacconists, the chemists (with their array of shaving brushes and soaps), the purveyors of cheese, wine, and crackers, the suppliers of little leather accessories of extraordinary expense . . .
      To an American this old-time consumption is curiously seductive and mysterious, nifty and quaint, magnetic and oddly repulsive. Like the heroic couplet, Jermyn Street is obviously unAmerican and yet insistent, a sort of standard although hard for an American to credit as a contemporary standard. Besides, one has the suspicion that all this isn't quite manly. But for the English, not so nervous about gender, it is not the same. There is a dynamic continuity for the gentleman between the neckties of yesteryear and today, just as no English poet writing after the Age of Reason seems ever quite to have got Pope out of his, or her, head. The inherited forms, formalism itself, are not restraints but memory and manners, the essentials of communication. Whitman and Pound want to romp, to make it new, to go down to the wild; Hardy and Auden are island men, taking their pleasure within borders.
      And since contingency is actually the governing condition for all human endeavor, there is a kind of clarity, tact, and maturity bred in the bone of the islander that is a reproach to those of us reared in the big open spaces, those of us who are happy to believe nothing can or will stop us. The two conditions—bordered and unhouseled—tend anyway toward different lexicons and different songlines.
      Sometimes though an islander succumbs to the call of the wild. I first read Thom Gunn in a little, squarish Faber paperback of selected poems by him and Ted Hughes (1962). I knew Hughes' The Hawk in the Rain but had never read Gunn. The jacket of the book says Gunn and Hughes are "the leaders" among the English poets who made their reputations in the preceding decade, "two young writers whose work is likely to be of permanent and major importance."
      This is not the place to compare Hughes and Gunn—enough to say that I was knocked for a loop by Hughes and found Gunn puzzling, elusive, disorienting. What were you supposed to make of all that portentous language, elevated diction, those traditional not to say archaic forms, all applied to his malapropos subjects?

                The Unsettled Motorcyclist's
                Vision of his Death

          Across the open countryside,
          Into the walls of rain I ride.
          . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
          Still, bent on the handle-bars,
          I urge my chosen instrument
          Against the mere embodiment.

      My college girlfriend rode a Bultaco Cemoto, a lovely 220cc. Spanish scrambler and in consequence I, not to be outdone, for a while rode a Yamaha 650—so I had learned something (not much) about motorcycles that I could bring to Gunn's poem. But the poem had turned experience into condition, and then, in a received language brooded over the condition at a pronounced distance.
      Perhaps because of his transplantation to San Francisco, over the years Gunn has let his ear register other sounds than the iambs and periods of that Metaphysical rhetoric that seemed then so insistent in his work. His phrasing at his best is now marvellously supple—even though that old-time religion is still strong in him. His love for the boys in leather hasn't abated either—but, again, over the years has become more overtly, and plainly, named. In this latest book, as much as in his earlier ones, Gunn seems to be playing out his own iteration of tradition and the individual talent. The tradition, as I have said, is strongly Metaphysical; the talent is considerable, and has been turned in particular to a long, daring, empathetic, moral, meditative exploration of the prices to be paid by the islander for his harking to the wild, and by the steppen- man for his heedlessness of boundaries. Gunn is especially good when writing about carnality and low life, the low life in oneself as well as in others. In Boss Cupid, we are talking explicitly about the old Adam, the persistence into what we tactfully now call middle age, and the irrepressible autonomy, of the rising cock.
          Being short with long blond hair, a sturdy kid
          Ahead of me in line. I gazed and gazed
          At his good back, feeling again, amazed,
          That almost envious sexual tension which
          Rubbing at made the greater, like an itch,
          An itch to steal or otherwise possess
          The brilliant restive charm, the boyishness . . .

          . . . If only I could do whatever he did,
          With him or as part of him, if I
          Could creep into his armpit like a fly,
          Or like a crab cling to his golden crotch
          Instead of having to stand back and watch.

      Here are Gunn's many gifts and also his bad habits: the beautiful phrasing, the easy, alert, placed attention to sex and the fine, moment-to-moment notation of its feeling, ebb and flow, implication . . . and then the, to my ear, unpleasant persistence of worn-out, received ideas and sounds. The lovely conversational enjambment of the first three lines is lost in the excessive stress placed on "which" and "itch":

          That almost envious sexual tension which
          Rubbing at made the greater, like an itch . . .

The habit of certain sounds, certain kinds of diction, certain arranging of observation substitute in Gunn too often for the apt word, the appropriate rhythm. It was so in the beginning, in his early work; it has been so; and it is so now. A small, random, but representative example:

          There is a tangible remoteness
          of the air about me, its clean chill
          ordering every room . . .
                —"Walking in a Newly Built House"

          I return to a sixth floor
          where I am staying: the sun
          ordering the untidy kitchen . . .
                —"New York"

It's habit, routine, not telling observation. And it happens too often, in poems of grace, craft, depth of feeling and thought—diminishing the work.
      But it's a failure, a stumble that the reader regrets rather than a gimmick, which is what we get in The World's Wife. The trick here is to retell the "world's" story from the point of view of the woman—Mrs. Midas, Mrs. Tiresias, Mrs. Rip Van Winkle, etc., to quote some of the book's titles. The point, presumably, is to give voice to the once voiceless, to cast a light into darkness, to make difference turn the world around so it can be seen more from the other side. In other hands—say in Szymborska's "Lot's Wife,"—this angle on things does just what you are led to expect, and in poems of power and force. But in Carol Ann Duffy's hands, alas, the idea is just a gimmick; worse, she can't resist every cheap shot, every snappy reversal, every pop rhyme. Duffy comes from Liverpool and there's a tradition there of the blending of pop and poetry, going back at least to the 60s Liverpool Poets as poetry's equivalent to the Beatles. And read out loud, in a packed pub or backed by a band, what reads like a gimmick on the page can work well in live performance. Imagine this with a background of smoke, amplifiers, booze:

                Mrs Icarus

          I'm not the first or the last
          to stand on a hillock,
          watching the man she married
          prove to the world
          he's a total, utter, absolute, Grade A pillock.

      But in the silence in which we read Gunn, the silence that's claimed for and made by poetry, these poems are jarringly noisy, hollow, one-dimensional, repetitive, without illumination, without a single surprise . . . making a total, utter, absolute, Grade A bad book.