I have been reading Walcott's 14th - White Egrets - published in his 80th year by Faber. This may be the finest late work in the English high modern lyric tradition since Yeats. Heaney will be set an example to follow by this well-wrought confession. The symbolic resonance of an old man's lusty, deteriorating memories and regrets (the egrets of the title) act as leitmotifs, along with the white horses of the sea, painting, palms, European and Carribean cities and ports, light, time, and poets and poetry - and death shadowing all. This book is a lofty collection whose each poem interlocks and interleaves with its neighbours, offering a particularly fragrant, emotive and sensuous experience of mood, place, and purpose. Both profoundly sad and inspiring, it is canonical writing of the highest level. An etude of loss, disease, desire, and post-colonialism. Do search it out.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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