The passages of joy /
The Passages of Joy draws it's title from Samuel Johnson's poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes": "Time hovered o'er, impatient to destroy/And shuts up all the Passages of Joy." The book ends with a poem about a modern cab driver on a night shift in San Francisco. In b...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
[1982]
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| Summary: | The Passages of Joy draws it's title from Samuel Johnson's poem "The Vanity of Human Wishes": "Time hovered o'er, impatient to destroy/And shuts up all the Passages of Joy." The book ends with a poem about a modern cab driver on a night shift in San Francisco. In between is accomplished and disturbing verse, dealing in part with the union, or the coincidence, of the old and the new; the ordered and the anarchic; the contemplated and the spontaneous{u2014}Johnson and the cabby. Gunn is concerned with both the experience of joy and its loss. A recurrent metaphor in the collection is the childhood game of "Hide and Seek," at the end of which, fantastically, all the lost are found. Some poems are about coming to terms with loss or helping others to do so. There are also evocations of those helplessly unfit for joy ("Slow Waker," "The Cat and the Wind," "Donahue's Sister," "The Victim"). "Sweet Things" takes a more sardonic view, implying by juxtaposition the equivalence between sexual appetite and greed for sugar. |
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| Item Description: | The Cushing Library/Women & Gender Studies copy was acquired as part of The Don Kelly Research Collection of Gay Literature and Culture. |
| Physical Description: | 85 pages ; 22 cm |
| ISBN: | 0374229902 9780374229900 0374517967 9780374517960 0571119212 9780571119219 |