Sad news. Poet and prose writer John Updike has died. Updike's was the epitome of a suave, suburban, East Coast style, cannily sexual and alert to the mores and foibles of a post-war period of boom and lust. The attention to detail in his writing was often half the fun. The poems, while often slight and merely clever, were of their age, and will likely be studied with renewed attention now. His work, it seems, may have been eclipsed in seeming importance this last decade, as his peer, Roth, emerged as a writer of greater range and output, but Updike was still a major figure to many, a man of letters who, had he lived, would always have been a potential winner of the Nobel.
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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