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Still, Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 111 pages; $22) offers a splendid introduction for the uninitiated. Almost all of Gunn's virtues are on display here: his playful metrical dexterity, his unflinching celebration both of beauty and of its transience. The subject of love crops up repeatedly in the book's 60 lyrics, but the Boss Cupid of the title is not the chubby winged cherub of popular lore. He is something of a hooligan, "devious master of our bodies," wreaker of joy and havoc: "Love makes the cuckoo heave its foster-siblings/Out of the nest, to spatter...
Imagine an Auden less reticent about the (male) objects of his affection, or a Philip Larkin shedding his librarian's tweeds for a leather jacket and motorcycle boots. Such imagined metamorphoses might give new readers some sense of the lively pleasures awaiting them in the poetry of Thom Gunn, 70. Those who have watched his distinguished career evolve over nearly half a century need, of course, no such introduction; news that a new book of Gunn's poems has arrived is enough to start their celebrations...
...years ago, we couldn't exist on campus in any way, shape, or form," Gunn says. "We're slowly working our way back in some places...
...Gunn is negotiating with the College administration to change this policy...
...Both Gunn and Blankson say it will take a lot of public relations work before ROTC is fully accepted by Harvard's liberal campus. But they also agree the school needs to recognize the good the military does...