It has been a funny old week-end, or so, here in the UK. Reading The Sunday Times I have discovered that the new Booker winner despises the telegenic parents of a missing child, that Mr. Clegg, a candidate for the Lib Dems leadership allegedly wrote glowingly of opium at Oxford when 18, that Hilary Clinton has no chance of winning the Presidency as she coldly jilted Socks post-White House, that one of the great geneticists and Nobel winners has been banned from his lecture tour of England as he is apparently a bigot - and, mostly oddly of all, that Dumbledore is "gay". J.K. Rowling, not to be confused with other initialled geniuses W.B. Yeats or T.S. Eliot, has "outed" one of her fictional characters, after selling a billion dollars worth of merchandise, some of it in text-based format, to adults and children - now, this once-anodyne billionairess is able to go all po-mo on us. Harry is bi, and Hogwarts is a cover for an S&M club. Why not go further J.K and tell us God is dead.
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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