This is a slim volume, just 10 poems (if you take the parts of The Geysers as a sequence of separate poems, 6 if you treat them as a single whole), but it is rich in Thom Gunn’s style and skill.
I will highlight two poems:
The Corporal, its close observation, the interplay of the life force of the young solider and the shadow death, the young man’s purpose and his fate?
The Bath House, the final and larger part of The Geysers, its broken line form part of the move away from the formality of earlier work, given a real physically to the experience of “the hot bath, barely endurable” ending “I am | I am raw meat | I am a god”
But I should also say that my particular copy had some delightful marginalia which I shared on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GnLMWjUhA/
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