I am writing without any books at hand by Thom Gunn or anyone else, a few days before a complicated move—from the East Coast back to California, then back to Massachusetts—feeling distinctly not at home. Since Gunn, whom I admire immensely, has a special relation to the idea of being at home, I will take that as the theme for these paragraphs.

There is a poise in Gunn's poetry, a confidence without much swagger, that is like the bearing of a creature at home in its surroundings. Yet in the way that Elizabeth Bishop cast herself as a traveler in the world—nearly anonymous, focused on sensation, a temporary presence—Gunn sometimes conveys the reserve and intimacy of a visitor, a mingled privacy and attention, focused on the space between souls, a provisional presence. Gunn's poems achieve a quality of being at home while on the move, but without the plodding caution of the turtle. The calm wildness of a cat, possibly, or of some imagined Zen master. (One might write "of a cat or a Zen master" if the tutelary Gunn spirit of honesty and accuracy were not hovering nearby, asking with a polite, not quite derisive smile what do I know about Zen masters.)

And to qualify "cat" a little, I think I mean the quality that made jazz musicians coin the term as alluding to a guy or bloke, with an emphasis on feral dignity, self-possession, readiness and possibly reckless skills. Also a keen sensitivity to atmosphere, the ability to make oneself at home.

Gunn's existential motorcycle toughs roaring through stanzas of jagged symmetry and keen meticulous sentences; the elegant iambic cable of his 'Tamer and Hawk', stretched over the Yeatsian short lines with a lilt I memorized from his first book, when I was in college; the free-verse equivalent governing the savage, telling enjambments of 'My Sad Captains' ("all / the past lapping them like a / cloak of chaos"); his poem about the dog, from inside her mind; poems from the inside of Old English; of LSD; his great essay on Hardy and the English ballad, his essays on Marianne Moore and Rod Taylor, on Yvor Winters and Basil Bunting, his celebrations of Robert Duncan and of J.V. Cunningham; the great elegies and meditations on San Francisco's AIDS epidemic, some of them in the grave, passionate diamond-perfect measures of Ben Jonson, some in street music—a range and size of work equaled by very few living poets.

The truly mysterious poise that runs through it could be described as the power to be at home with the alien or unlikely: with various metrical extremes and modes; with the manners of various kinds of people, like Odysseus; with many countries and cities and cultures; at home with a kind, unsentimental holding back of judgment; but also at home exercising his judgment, mentioning serenely that he thinks some much praised book is very badly written, or that (say) some lyrics by the Talking Heads are very good. Moly is a book about being at home even in transformation, in distortion.

Absurd to think of Thom Gunn as an expatriate: San Francisco is his home city as few people find homes. He lives in his house and garden in a way that combines the English gift for coziness with California's elegant openness to air. The atmosphere of his house, familial but with a sense of privacies and amiable distinctions within the familial, reminds me of the happy mixture of being alone while with others on the bus that he chooses to ride across the Bay, between work in Berkeley and home in San Francisco. The subdued community of the bus—where Gunn often works on poems—is different from the busy island of a car in a way somehow like the pace and closeness of Gunn's imagination: the non-driver who wrote "One is always nearer by not keeping still".

I think he rides the generational trolley car of fame with a kind of amused impersonality, too. (Cary Grant's image: he talks somewhere about actors getting on the trolley and, with a certain amount of savage fighting not to fall off, riding it.) Thom Gunn is a kind of model for how to take the ups and downs of that ride. Happy to live without courting the coteries, alliances and constituencies that sometimes buoy reputations synthetically, he also seems incapable of the kind of self promotion that allows some artists to explain their importance to others. He once fell into friendly conversation for half an hour with a woman in a bar, telling one another their occupations and so forth; when she left, her parting wish to him was "I hope you get published some day". Thom I think mistakes the point of this story: he seems to think it illustrates how very much most people assume that poetry is not published. But what is striking about it is that he didn't drop any phrases along the lines of "my publisher" and so forth.

How to explain this absence of self-promotion in one who has so very little to be unpretentious about? Maybe Thom Gunn's sense of the ridiculous is too strong for boasting. It is hard to imagine a pompous message written on the back of the post cards he ferrets out somewhere: fifties workers in white smocks preparing a health tonic called something like VitaGreen; a wig company's advertisement, the same woman three times modeling the same stiffly styled wig in colors called 'Autumn Haze', 'Sun Drip', 'Mink'.

But to say 'sense of proportion' would imply smallness. Only an extremely ambitious writer could have made as many unforgettable poems as Thom Gunn, reaching in new directions with each book. That is why the idea of being at home, which is to say at home with himself, seems germane to me. The word 'expatriate' evokes tremendously wrong images of self-conscious exile or making a point or of being in, while not of, the dwelling place. Thom Gunn seems to live inside the rhythms and meanings and structures of our English language with a fresh, venturesome eagerness, and a mastery that make being merely an American poet or an English one seem beside the point. As Thom Gunn has written of Hardy's work in relation to Hardy's character, "It is a happy embodiment".