Boss Cupid

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 sinceThe 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.Gunn, Thom is the author of 'Boss Cupid' with ISBN 9780374115579 and ISBN 0374115575.