The Missing | Literary Criticism & Book Review

The Missing Critical Overview

Hugh Haughton in The Times Literary Supplement praises the The Man with Night Sweats for its "somewhat scaresome lucidity" and feels the poem "seeks to render permanent the transitory embraces through which we play out our need for each other and shield ourselves." Haughton also notes that "Gunn's verse has always been marked by a strange combination of intimacy and detachment... Gunn's lyrics hold experience and the reader at arm's length." In "The Missing," Haughton detects a poet "poignantly facing his physical vulnerability," as "the speaker constructs a kind of bounding shield out of the tightly interlaced ... rhymed ... quatrains." The reviewer sees the poem in terms of the embrace, a recurring image in the collection and Gunn's work in general. "Seeking to define his need for solidarity, he adopts another very different image of an 'embrace.' ... Of course the 'supple en-twinement' of that 'unlimited embrace,' the source...
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