The best Christmas present I received this year was from Rachael, who gave me a first edition of Thom Gunn's Touch in perfect condition- its beautiful. You've probably read it before, but I thought I'd put up the title poem just in case you haven't, so you can see how truly wonderful it is.
Touch
You are already
asleep. I lower
myself in next to
you, my skin slightly
numb with the restraint
of habits, the patina of
self, the black frost
of outsideness, so that even
unclothed it is
a resilient chilly
hardness, a superficially
malleable, dead
rubbery texture.
You are a mound
of bedclothes, where the cat
in sleep braces
its paws against your
calf through the blankets,
and kneads each paw in turn.
Meanwhile and slowly
I feel a is it
my own warmth surfacing or
the ferment of your whole
body that in darkness beneath
the cover is stealing
bit by bit to break
down that chill.
You turn and
hold me tightly, do
you know who
I am or am I
your mother or
the nearest human being t
hold on to in a
dreamed pogrom.
What I, now loosened,
sink into is an old
big place, it is
there already, for
you are already
there, and the cat
got there before you. yet
it is hard to locate.
What is more, the place is
not found but seeps
from our touch in
continuous creation, dark
enclosing cocoon round
ourselves alone, dark
wide realm where we
walk with everyone.
I also found a bit in the Time Literary Supplement recently that encapsulates so much about what Thom Gunn does in his poetry in so few words. In a review on new criticism on the poet, Graeme Richardson wrote that 'Gunn's gift was modestly to impose control on multifarious but unique experience'.