The title-poem of Thom Gunn's [Jack Straw's Castle] is a scary sequence which concentrates in itself most of the thematic and technical problems this considerable poet now faces. In a famous early Gunn poem, 'Human Condition', the castle image stood for a defiant, existential individualism, spelt out in six tight-lipped stanzas. Today, the personal fortress is depressingly lonely, full of sinister apprehensions (furies with 'mad puppety heads') and nightmares which reproach the poet for dreaming them. It has more rooms and voices than he can comprehend, ominous cellars, and a staircase which stops in air. And it takes nine pages and 11 sections before he can bring himself to live with the man he finds in it. Coming to terms with all this appears to have been a harsh necessity. But the poem only partially works: read as a whole, it feels wilfully bizarre, and ragged in structure.

This...