Here at Last is Love
Selected Poems of
Dunstan Thompson
edited by Gregory Wolfe
with an afterword by Dana Gioia
HERE AT LAST IS LOVE
Selected Poems of Dunstan Thompson
Copyright © 2015 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Slant
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-1810-8
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-1811-5
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Thompson, Dunstan, 1918–1975.
Here at last is love : selected poems of Dunstan Thompson / Dunstan Thompson ; edited with an introduction by Gregory Wolfe ; afterword by Dana Gioia.
ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-1810-8
xxxii + 128 p., 23 cm
1. American Poetry—21st Century. I. Wolfe, Gregory. II. Gioia, Dana. III. Title.
PS 3539.H65 H4 2015
Manufactured in the USA.
Praise for Here at Last is Love
“Father Hopkins wrote, ‘This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond.’ Dunstan Thompson is an immortal diamond too long lost to poetry readers. Here are poems that show the workings of a complex interiority in touch with history’s quirks, the world at war, personal relationships, and struggles of the human heart. Even at their most fervently erotic, they disclose a yearning for something that would allow the poems’ various speakers to be more so that they may love more fully. From the elaborate sensuality of the early poems to the plainspoken urbanity and wit of the later, one constantly encounters an exuberance for life, a quest for meaning in a turbulent world, and openness to the divine spark in all things. This is a volume to be cherished, one that brings us back into touch with a vital American voice.”
—Jerry Harp, author of Creature, Gatherings, and Urban Flowers, Concrete Plains
“This remarkable volume should complicate efforts to make a conversion narrative out of Thompson’s poetry. Theological and erotic ‘loneliness’ in the early work are inextricable from and further enriched by an astonishing sensibility concerning war. What could belong more to Catholic tradition than poetry which joins contemplation, eroticism, and physical suffering? Without the critical constrictions of sexual identification, we can compare Thompson’s formal poems to Millay’s impassioned sonnets as well as to Crane’s intricate music and metaphors. We are freed to consider breadth rather than trajectory: his insistent rhymes, striking meter, and haunting addresses that, in later works, move toward relaxed cadences, sublimated references, and less directly personal subjects. Lucky for us, we don’t have to choose between binaries. Much gratitude to the editor for presenting the strongest of Thompson’s work as a whole and highlighting for us its power and its revisionary place in modern poetics.”
—Martha Serpas, author of The Diener and The Dirty Side of the Storm
“From the very beginning, with the 1943 publication of his volume Poems and his editorship of the influential Modernist literary magazine Vice Versa, Dunstan Thompson established himself as one of the most rigorous, formally adept, and brilliant poets of his generation. Here, for the first time, Gregory Wolfe draws poems from the poet’s entire writing life, including his harrowing, erotic wartime poetry and his almost entirely unavailable, more reflective work of maturity. In doing so, he brings to new audiences the work of an essential mid-century poet, one I am confident will become much more important as his readership expands.”
—Kevin Prufer, co-editor of Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master
“The bubble reputation is unreliable. Nearing the end, both Melville and Crane believed themselves forgotten. After Auden came to the United States and renewed the faith he had earlier put aside, much of his audience devalued his later poems. Dunstan Thompson’s fame underwent a similar eclipse, an injustice this volume strives to remedy. The preface by Gregory Wolfe and afterword by Dana Gioia begin the task of locating and elucidating Thompson’s excellence, both as a novice and a mature poet. His choice to be celibate in later life is one he likely would not make today, given that we now have support organizations for gay Catholics like Dignity. But that choice has no bearing on the value of his work, which exchanged the lushness and romantic difficulty of the early poems for a simpler and more vulnerable approach. Early and late, he enjoyed a skill with meter and rhyme that few twentieth-century poets have equaled.”
—Alfred Corn, author of Unions
“Dunstan Thompson’s poetry first became known to me in Oscar Williams’ The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, one of my English texts from high school. His lovely poems in that book—‘Nor Mars His Sword,’ ‘The Lay of the Battle of Tombland’—were lost to me when I lost the anthology somewhere along the way. Now I am happy to see these poems restored, with much else of value, in this selection edited by Gregory Wolfe. Here at Last is Love, indeed, and here again is Dunstan Thompson, with a lyricism and a faith that remain rare in our poetry.”
—Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems
“How often are we gifted with a collection of poems like Dunstan Thompson’s, which have been uncovered and restored to life again by Gregory Wolfe and Dana Gioia? Thompson was an American poet (1918–1975) in a tradition that encompasses, among others, Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden, and also includes the Greek and Roman classics in a fashion reminiscent of Robert Lowell. Thompson’s early homoerotic poems—rising as they do from the fever and exhaustion of World War II—still have an amazing capacity to enchant and terrorize us. Add to that a Catholic vision which manages to embody the darkness of Baudelaire’s flowers of evil as well as the hard-won redemptive vision of Augustine, John of the Cross, and Hopkins, and you have a sense of what Thompson has to offer us. This volume is a truly significant addition to twentieth-century American poetry and, even more, a vivid, heartbreaking, and authentic contribution to the core poetry of the Catholic imagination.”
—Paul Mariani, author of Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected, and Revised Poems
Drawing by Barry Moser
Introduction
gregory wolfe
In place of gold, he sets
A banished life between
Driftwood, and out of fish nets
Roofs his loss with sea green.
Thus lives unexiled, though
Abandoned, stranded, scanned
By the Dog Star only, for so
Based, his poems are his own land.
—Dunstan Thompson, “Ovid on the Dacian Coast”
Until quite recently, the life and work of the mid-twentieth century American poet Dunstan Thompson were known only to a dwindling number of literary historians and aging contemporaries. For those few who were acquainted with his story, the narrative had a familiar—even comforting—shape: it was a tragic tale of “rise and fall.”