'I can try / At least to get my snapshots accurate,' Thom Gunn remarks in one of the poems in his new collection, The Passages of Joy. The critical essays assembled in The Occasions of Poetry pay tribute to other poets who have done so. Crisp bits of verbal photography are frequently held up for admiration. Keats is praised for his 'sharp-eyed exactness'; Hardy, congratulated on the 'clarity of … [his] images'. William Carlos Williams—in some ways the key exhibit—is enthused over as though he were a flawless camera lens: 'clear delineation … perfect accuracy'.

Gunn aims at achieving similar results. Cloudiness caused by out-of-focus rhetoric or 'confessional' over-exposure is deplored in the essays. The poems brilliantly snap up a collection of high-definition images. But there's more to them than mere Nikon precision…. [Gunn] invests his own sharp images with depths of significance: 'every detail brightened with meaning'...