Dana Gioia\u2019s essay on his life and work<\/a>. I\u2019ve had to admit that I am not a person who easily grasps poetry, so I picked this up basically because he\u2019s One Of Us and you have to show the flag, no? But then I read it and discovered how much I love this guy\u2019s writing.<\/p>\nYou can roughly divide the poems into two camps. The earlier ones (to overgeneralize) are tormented, writhing under a percussive hangover iambic. They\u2019re often sexual in a decadent, obscured, miserable way; when they\u2019re sexy it\u2019s the sexiness of violent self-loathing:<\/p>\n
This tall horseman, my young man of Mars,
\nScatters the gold dust from his hair, and takes
\nMe to pieces like a gun.<\/p>\n
Mirrors, betrayals, killer kings fooled by their favorites; a longing for friendship, a longing \u201cNot always to beware the outstretched hand,\u201d but a collapse into ravished and ravishing lust.<\/p>\n
This stuff made a big splash, partly for its talent and partly for its shock value. Thompson wrote as an American serviceman hymning his liaisons with other soldiers. He imagined \u201cthe enemy,\u201d too, as mourner and lover, as lost and alone and in need of grace.<\/p>\n
Then Thompson met Philip Trower, with whom he\u2019d build a life. At first they were your basic gay couple. Then Thompson returned to the practice of his childhood Catholic faith\u2013and Trower agreed to live celibately with him, to continue their partnership. Trower soon became Catholic himself and they led what by all accounts seems to have been several happy decades together, loving God and one another. But even before the return to the Church, Thompson\u2019s poetry had shifted.<\/p>\n
Under the influence of domestic happiness, peacetime, perhaps the slow stretch of the hand again toward the fire of faith, his poetry calmed down. He began to experiment with different meters, and turned away from the scarlet confessional-curtain tone of the early poems. The new work wasn\u2019t nearly as popular, and Thompson fell into obscurity. To be honest, I expected that I too would prefer the lush miserablism of the early stuff (I love the Smiths\u2026).<\/p>\n
But no! The \u201cCatholic poems\u201d (man, all his poems are Catholic poems) are great<\/em>. They can be playful, as in the very 1960s-feeling poem about \u201cthe saints with the lollipop eyes,\u201d<\/p>\nThe fleas in their hair
\nLikewise at prayer.<\/p>\n
The themes are well-wrought and unexpected: poverty is one theme, God as lover of the poor. In these poems you become most truly yourself by renouncing self-will: His Magdalen finds that \u201cThis was never happiness, the slow\/Effacement of God\u2019s image in her soul.\u201d \u201cThe daily going up in smoke of self\u201d brings joy. Holiness is being truly oneself. Heaven is friendship, happiness, and home. There\u2019s a lovely poem about sculptors\u2019 models which is also, I think, about the trajectory I perhaps project onto, perhaps discern within Thompson\u2019s own life\u2013you learn how you look in the eyes of God by seeing how you look in the eyes of a man who loves you.<\/p>\n
I loved this book, truly. The early poems are wrack and the later ones refuge, and both states of life are portrayed with such deep emotion. First longing and then trust. In the words Thompson gives to a desert abbot:<\/p>\n
This ordered life is not for everyone.
\nNever, to their surprise, for those who run
\nAway from love.<\/p>\n
As it happens a wonderful reader also sent me Tillotson<\/strong><\/em>, Philip Trower\u2019s own novel which is dedicated to Thompson. Tillotson<\/em> is a weird book! It\u2019s a scathing novel about social climbers and would-be intellectuals in the fictitious Mediterranean country of Doria, shortly after World War II. Elite social life in the town of Tortola revolves around Tillotson, a brilliant or possibly just overpraised art critic. Everybody\u2019s constantly talking about what Tillotson might think, when Tillotson will come, whom Tillotson will invite to his parties. You can maybe already guess that Tillotson at no point will show his face, existing merely to expose the hopes, delusions, and pretensions of those around him.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s hard to write a novel in which people misunderstand themselves and one another as consistently as they do in real life, and so I do admire Tillotson<\/em> for being such a tangle of missed cues and wrong inferences. It\u2019s a little too explicit in laying out exactly how each character is fooling himself or herself, and it\u2019s difficult to feel anything for such self-absorbed characters; the whole book has a sardonic chill which makes it hard to love.<\/p>\nWhere Trower shines is in the metaphors. The book is studded with them like sultanas in a bread pudding: \u201cThe British government had given her an M.B.E. for living in a cellar and sending secret messages by wireless during the German occupation, and also\u2013as though she were a housemaid needing a reference\u2013a piece of paper to tell her how brave she had been.\u201d \u201cHer voice was thick and her eyes went blank a second time. Her faculties were like doors banging in the wind, doors which were opened and shut not by the owner of the house, but by some overriding and capricious force.\u201d Fireflies move through a garden like the cigarettes of party guests; \u201cempty glasses stood in twos and threes like ghosts of the conversations they had occasioned.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then at the very end this sardonic social novel swerves. A misbegotten murder strikes the wrong victim, and the final paragraphs are a gentle, even hopeful meditation on death and what might come after. And in an odd way you do see how these two wildly different books might be written by two people who found one another and held fast.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
linked by the lives of the authors. Dunstan Thompson, Here at Last Is Love: Selected Poems. I first found out about this Catholic, gay, celibate poet from Dana Gioia\u2019s essay on his life and work. I\u2019ve had to admit that I am not a person who easily grasps poetry, so I picked this up basically […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,9,7],"tags":[431,1459,1264,11],"class_list":["post-13309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-gay-catholic-whatnot","category-mackerel-snapping","tag-cupid-and-psycho","tag-dunstan-thompson","tag-gay-catholic-whatnot","tag-his-banner-over-me-was-love"],"yoast_head":"\n
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