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One of the half-dozen great poets of the Twentieth Century
As I type this my copy of Thom Gunn, "Selected Poems" is on my computer desk.He is a rarity, a classic poet in the English language. He is comparable with John Donne, Lord Byron, Frank O'Hara and a few others. He kept on growing up his last days. ... Read more

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Gunn with Feeling!
Thom Gunn's "Night Sweats" is one of his finest books of poetry.He is a master at writing lines that are so rhythmatic and flowing.These poemsdeal with AIDS and also drug use.They are not easy to read, and very sadat times.But they deal with problems and subjects most of us have had toface in the last 20 years, whether we liked it or not.There is truefeeling and honesty here.I especially enjoyed "In the Time of Plague" and"Memory Unsettled."

I recommend this book as part of your permanentcollection to be read again and again.Thom Gunn's poetry is the best.

Beautiful, sad, and moving poetry
Thom Gunn is a masterful poet, and this is a book full of beauty and pain.Many of the poems deal directly with AIDS, many (such as the title work) with heroin use.And yet they are not preachy, or sentimental.He is infirm control of difficult subject matter.

Also pleasing is his use ofrhythm and meter -- Gunn is one of apparently few modern poets who stillwrites powerfully within a given meter and rhyme scheme.

Not light oreasy reading, these poems are sad and sobering.Tears are advised but notrequired. ... Read more

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In his Collected Poems, Gunn has assembled all of the work he considers worthy from throughout his remarkable career. The work establishes the breadth of his work, from the classically inspired early poems to the stylistically exuberant poems of the 1960's. This gathering together of the full range of Gunn's work reveals the enormous extent of his creative achievement.Amazon.com Review
Thom Gunn has always known how to refresh his sight. His CollectedPoems offers startling and capacious poems that haven't appearedbefore in book form--poems that make a case that there is no such thingas a typical Thom Gunn poem, such as "At the Barriers" and "Confessions ofa Life Artist":

People will forget Shakespeare.
He will lie with George Formby
and me, here where the swine root.
Later, the solar system
will flare up and fall into
space, irretrievably lost.

For the loss, as for the life,
there will be no excuse, there
is no justification.

Gunn's poems untwist the conundrum of knowing and transform it intowisdom--that which is beyond the self, beyond the mediating circumstance. His ispoetry that you can turn to in the dead of night for hard words that do notexclude. ... Read more

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a truly astounding poet
Thom Gunn is definitely one of my favorite poets, and this book collects his work up to _The Man with Night Sweats_, which is one of the better poetry collections there are. Gunn is a very uneven poet, and when he is bad, he is truly awful. But he has some of the best poems I've read. And this collection is a fun one to read, one best read slowly, over a long period of time, so that it can be savored. Gunn writes well in both free and formal verse, and he does interesting things with syllabics. He is one of the best poets we have.

BOTH of the previous reviews are helpful and accurate...
I am delighted that this kind of serious discussion about poetry takes place on Amazon!

In my opinion, Gunn (who is probably my favorite living poet) is what I would call a major minor English poet. This, of course, means his work IS limited compared with more broad and singularly important figures such as Keats and Auden. (I think Larkin, whom I admire, is a bad comparison--he's quite limited himself, especially in his prejudices against foreign (read: non-British) poets, etc.) I think modesty of a kind and slightness are a part of Gunn's intentional aims as a writer. He stubbornly--and graciously--refuses to overdo it. And many of his readers, myself included, remain grateful for such decency and tough-mindedness. It's a rare gift. On the other hand, he really surpasses himself at times, and rises to supreme heights, such as in his poem "To Cupid", which appears in his most recent collection Boss Cupid. That makes him a distant nephew of Baudelaire. I don't think I've seen anything quite like "Moly" before either. And there are countless other fine examples of his artistry.

One fault of Gunn's early poetry is that he isn't especially funny! He seems to be making up for that though, at a later date. Also, he may have seemed too cold and technical in the beginning, like a scalpel, at times--a mistake that's happily been mostly washed away by the passing years. (The wonderful poet Mina Loy, who is a favorite of Gunn's--he may write about her work better than anybody else--curiously also displays these same dislikable characteristics in a number of poems. And she doesn't transcend her own propriety nearly enough, unlike Gunn.)

Gunn seems to use illegal drugs not just for the thrill effect, but also as a kind of dynamite, to blast open his creative resources. So he seems to be very aware of the problem. I can only applaud him for that. And his transplanting himself in America, San Francisco no less, was such a gutsy move, it may well have saved his career, or perhaps even his life! Look what our country contributed to these Collected Poems. That's something to feel proud of. He is a son of Whitman and Duncan as well as Shakespeare.

Futhermore it may be figures like Gunn who stay with us more than many of the big guns. Just as Elizabeth Bishop has come to be viewed as more admirable and enjoyable, in certain respects, than Robert Lowell, I wouldn't be surprised if Gunn gains a bit of an edge over the truly majestic Ted Hughes in the future.

Comments to add to Jeremy Reed's review...
Whilst finding the review above helpful, interesting and informed, I would like to add a few comments:

1) Gunn's early work is often technically smug and so playful that it verges on the trite. (see Carnal Knowledge andothers from A Sense of Movement).

2) Gunn is generally successful, but inlimited aims. Consequently contemporaries like Larkin are consistently morepowerful. It is unfair to judge it by a greatness it doesn't pretendto.

3) The surprise expressed at the conventional form is telling. Gunndoes not tend to use the mechanics of poetry to their most powerful effect. The subtlety of sentiment he shows in poems such as Autumn Chapter in aNovel is not everywhere present. Whilst he gains a greater freedom with hiscultural and pharmaceutical roamings, he needsgreater discipline toachieve either classical or romantic virtues. It is hard to tell which heaspires to.

4) Gunn's most recent book, Boss Cupid, is, after a promisingstart, generally loose, self-indulgent and weary. He appears to be past hisbest...

Generally, I'd say that Gunn is an important and good poet, butwould caution against eulogising him...!

The Evolution of a Great Poet
One of the most exciting and challenging bodies of poetry created over the past forty years, Thom Gunn's Collected Poems offers a heady Anglo-American cocktail of liberal sensuality, often contained within surprisinglyconventional forms.

Gunn's poetry is characterised by a cool senseof intellectual detachment, and a penetratingly lucid ability to followexperience to its resolvable core. This sensibility is offered indisarmingly casual, laid-back tones inherited from post-60's Americanpoetry. Gunn successfully pulled off that rare and necessary trick ofre-inventing himself through American poetry, thus bypassing thepedestrianism which blighted so many of his British contemporaries. Thisongoing re-invention and self-resurrection is one of the most interestingand inspiring subtexts of his Collected Poems.

Taking up residencein the United States in 1954, Gunn soon got turned on to a variety ofrecreational drugs, including LSD. Clearly, these experiences proved acatalyst, shifting the terrain of Gunn's work. Yet right from the start,Gunn had presented an angular, leather-cased shoulder to social convention.In The Sense Of Movement (1957),he sided with the Beat and Teddy-Boyculture of the late 50's, employing motorbikes and Elvis as distinctlyvalid,modern subjects for poetry. Gunn's telling lines in the poem "ElvisPresley" could also be read as a credo for his own evolving poetics:

"Heturns revolt into a style, prolongs/The impulse to a habit of the time."

Turning revolt into a style was to prove Gunn's directive. While theallegorical poems from his first two books still draw on unsurprisingthemes and employ myth and religion rather conventionally to explore theirsubjects, a liberating undertow of defiance is everywhere present. In "HighFidelity", a poem about listening to records, Gunn's metaphysicalplayfulness works to impose reason on an emerging pop culture:

"I playyour furies back to me at night,/ The needle dances in the grooves theymade,/ For fury is passion like love, and fury's bite/ These grooves, nosooner than a love mark fades..."

By the time Gunn published Moly in1971, he was deeply involved in the west coastrock scene of outdoorfestivals and psychedelic happenings, and his work took on a spacey, almostvisionary quality. Poems like "Tom-Dobin," "The Colour Machine," "StreetSong," "The Fair In The Woods,""The Messenger," and "At the Centre" areall examples of a poetry siding with altered states.Gunn writes about hisLSD experiences with remarkable clarity:

"...Later, downstairs and at thekitchen table,/I look round at my friends. Through light we move/Like foam.We started choosing long ago/--clearly and capably as we wereable--/Hostages from the pouring we are of. /The faces are as bright now asfresh snow."----(From "At the Centre")

Gunn's first fivecollections, represented in the first half of Collected Poems, gave littleindication of his coming out as a gay man. The acid landscape of Moly,however, seems to have provided a space of psychological transitionnecessary for the poet to write more explicitly about his sexuality. SinceJack Straw's Castle (1976),his work has been explicitly informed by thedetails of his engagement with the gay subculture and its interactions withthe culture at large. It is also more explicit about his interior emotionallandscape.

Ten years lapsed between Gunn's publication of ThePassages of Joy (1982) and The Man With Night Sweats (1992). This intervalis in part attributable to the adjustment, personal and poetic, to watchinga generation liquidated by AIDS. The plague and its increasing casualtieshave proved a central subject for Gunn's later poetry, and by the finalphase of the Collected Poems he has taken on the role of principal elegistto a virally stricken gay community. The poem"Elegy" first provided Gunnthe stripped-down manner and elegiac tone which he needed for his task, andwhich he has subsequently made inimitably his own. Here, a sense of theunwavering terror at the heart of suicide is powerfully evoked:

"Though Ihardly knew him /I rehearse it again and again/ Did he smell eucalyptuslast?/No it was his own blood/as he choked on it"

In Thom Gunn'sincarnation as a compassionate, deeply humane elegist to dying friends, histouch is neither too grave nor too light. Steeped in 17th century poetry-aperiod rich in the elegist's art-he proved himself as adept at writingformal couplets in the celebration of the dying or the dead as he had atwriting free verse. "The Missing" is a particularly successful late poem inGunn's canon. In it, he perceives himself as belonging to a universal gayfamily, a resilient but continuously reduced nucleus in which survival isall.

"Now as I watch the progress of the plague,/ The friends surroundingme fall sick, grow thin, /And drop away. Bared, is my shape lessvague/Sharply exposed and with a sculpted skin?// I do not like thestatue's chill contour,/ Not nowadays. The warmth investing me /led outwardthrough mind, limb feeling and more/ In an involved increasing family. //Contact of a friend led to another friend, /Supple entwinement through theliving mass /Which for all that I knew might have no end, /Image of anunlimited embrace."

Nobody has or will put this better. Gunn'sachievements over four decades of writing are those of an innovator pushingthe boundaries of the accepted subject matter of poetry. He is a master ofthe compressed lyric executed in formal stanzas, yet he is always modern.And he is compellingly truthful.

An outsider to British poetry byreason of place and sensibility, Gunn is, to me, the most exciting poet ofhis generation. The Collected Poems is the place to get at the whole bodyof work of a poet who continues to surprise, who celebrates those who liveon the cutting edge of social and sexual issues in our crazily up-ended,but always meaningful world. ... Read more

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a weak collection
i know gunn is a good poet, i've read many poems he has written that i like. but this collection is weaker than gunn's usual work. the book does get stronger as it goes on, making section three the strongest of the three sections.

Adventurous
Thom Gunn's poetry is marvelously crafted and filled with intriguing imagery. His series of poems about Jeffrey Dahmer is rather thought-provoking. For me, his poetry doesn't have an emotional impact, but rather a mental one. I prefer fiery poems, that rattle my brain and shake my worldview. Gunn achieves that in some poems, but not all in this collection. I can see why he's highly acclaimed, though. It's just not my taste.

...And taste your boyish glow.
I consider myself completely unqualified to "review" poetry, but I must say I find Gunn's work wholly satisfying and moving.I read poetry rarely -- dabbling self-indulgently in a bit of Anne Sexton when I'mfeeling blue and morbid -- but I purchased "The Man With theNightsweats" on it's paperback release and have kept it near to handsince.When "Boss Cupid" was published, a friend presented mewith the book and I devoured it.It's been nearly two months now, and nota day has gone by that I haven't revisited the book, either by physicallyreading or musing on its charms.Long live Thom Gunn.

Not a Poet!
I'm not a poet, I just enjoy and love reading poetry.Thiswas my first time reading Thom Gunn's poetry, and I was reallyimpressed by his new book of poetry, "Boss Cupid." This is also the first book of poetry I have read right through to the end in one setting, and then re-read most of them again.That's how much I enjoyed Mr. Gunn's poems.

The book is divided into 3 sections of different subject matter.I enjoyed the second section, "Gossip" the most.There are a lot of poems about nights in bars, poems about bartenders, lovers, and other gay friends, and experiences.The poem, "Letters from Manhattan" is an interesting poem about his friend and that friends sexual affairs with young men in outdoor settings in Manhattan.In "American Boy" he talks about hating older men who bothered him when he was young, but now that his is old himself, he's attracted to younger men, and their love sustains him and gives him enlightenment in his old age. And then there are many other poems covering a wide range of subjects from King David to Jeffrey Dahmer.

If you enjoy poetry that's intelligent, easy to read and understand, and full of gay experiences you can relate to, and other life experiences, you will truly enjoy this book.Now that I am a fan of Thom Gunn, I can't wait to read his "Collected Poems" (1994) edition.This book is highly recommended.END

An aging poet becomes stronger and finer!
I think this new book shows Thom Gunn at his greatest as a poet. Many people who became fans of Gunn's work (very understandably)because of his last collection of poems, The Man with Night Sweats, probably won't be quite sure what to do with this material. But it's very characteristic of him, really! Both in style and in subject matter. Experimental yet classical, freewheeling but sane--the book's entire premise is the triumph of love in all matter of circumstances. And those readers who positively reviewed Gunn's Collected Poems, will recognize that the master has taken all of his knowledge of poetic forms (quite considerable) and his life experience (ditto) ahead, in a way that makes his true fans want to follow his every move; it's a virtuosic performance."To Cupid" ("You make desire seems easy./ So it is:/ Your service perfect freedom to enjoy/ Fresh limitations.") isn't just one of the best poems Gunn has ever written, it's one of the best poems ANYBODY has ever written. It incorporates the motif of The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal, who is certainly one of Gunn's most obvious literary fathers. As is Baudelaire: whose richness of romantic diction and sentiment is echoed in the poem, and others. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gunn may be be reprimanded in some quarters for not becoming a clever and ironic realist. But that's not what we want from either one of them; they're more likable, and perhaps wiser, than that.With "Duncan"--a poem dedicated to his late friend, the excellent American poet Robert Duncan, Gunn proves once again both his own need for truthfulness, and his appreciation of the habits and affections of others. (H.D., a poet Gunn formerly trashed--I think, unfairly--in an essay on women poets makes a startling guest appearance in the poem.) "A Home" is one of the most heartbreaking poems Gunn has ever written; it's marvellous. ("Raised, he said, not at home but in a Home...Between the boys/ Contact, not loose, not free, consisting mainly/ In the wrestling down of slave by slave. Call this/ The economy of bruises: threats of worse/ Pin you in place, for more convenient handling./ And nothing occurs casually but dirt.") The "Troubadour" cycle, which is subtitled "songs for Jeffrey Dahmer," is bound to turn many heads, or even disgust listeners. But I think the poems are well done (especially the first and second to last) and Gunn is trying to be honest here too: to admit what happens when one's desire becomes too strong, and you cannot let go of the beloved--in tragic and comic proportions. Also highly noteworthy are the connected poems "In The Post Office" and "Postscript: The Panel" which are, I believe, about the same Charlie Hinkle who is honored, as a victim of AIDS and as a poet, in Gunn's famous last volume. I like these two poems even better than the really exceptional former work. I feel the subject is brought more to life; we can almost see and touch him as the remarkable person he must have been. And that was his dying request, if I understand it right. I won't ever forget the lines: "I hadn't felt it roused, to tell the truth,/ In several years, that old man's greed for youth,/ Like Pelias's that boiled him to a soup,/ Not since I'd had the sense to cover up/ My own particular seething can of worms,/ And settle for a friendship on your terms." Or, "If only I could do whatever he did,/ With him or as a part of him, if I/ Could creep into his armpit like a fly,/ Or like a crab cling to his golden crotch,/ Instead of having to stand back and watch." And especially: "I thought that we had shared you more or less,/ As if we shared what no one might possess,/ Since in a net we sought to hold the wind." I haven't yet mentioned Gunn's religious poetry--which was a surprise to me! A pleasant one. Since he brings all of his intelligence and passionate feeling to bear on that subject as well. And it turns out to be not very far away from the rest of the book, what he's telling us, in the "Dancing David" poems, most of all.I also love "Arethusa Raped" (after Shelley), "Famous Friends" and "The little cousin dashed in" and "Save the word"--all featured in the wonderful middle section of the collection, entitled GOSSIP. "In Trust" and "A Wood near Athens" are absolutely superb.Will Boss Cupid receive as much praise and notoriety as Ted Hughes' last collection Birthday Letters and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf? Well, it should. Gunn has done truly exceptional and lasting work, and he deserves the credit for it.I think he's the greatest living poet in the world and he's never been better than this. That's something to feel grateful for, at least. ... Read more

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Beautiful Sadness
With Randall Mann's poetry, you are almost instructed to be more observant. You are instructed to be the protagonist & observe the other people & things around. With that said, these poems are very polished & though simple, they achieve a deeper purpose of carrying the reader through the sunrise, sunset, shops, & marketplaces of a particular place. There are a few surprises in this book, showing the evolving Randall Mann with the poems "Orpheus at Cafe Flore" & "N" both of which are strong, pure & profane in the same serving. Mann seems to achieve this purity & profanity alike, showing his personality through these structures & forms. There are slant rhymes, subtle rhythmic changes & overall, there is a unified celebration of life & a continued "engine" (from the poem "N") of moving forward. ... Read more

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"For me the act of writing is an exploration, a reaching out, an act of trusting search for the correct incantation that will return me certain feelings whenever I want them. And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations." --Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn is well-known as a poet, and increasingly as a literary critic. The Occasions of Poetry includes insightful critical pieces on writers ranging from William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder to Thomas Hardy and Robert Duncan. "The occasion in all cases," writes Gunn, "is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true." The first loyalty of a writer who is "true to his occasions," he writes, must be to the facts of experience.
The book includes five autobiographical essays, which combine to form an engaging account of the author's development as a poet and to chronicle some of the most significant literary currents of recent decades, both in England and America.
Thom Gunn, born in England in 1929, has lived in America since 1954. His books include Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview; The Man with Night Sweats; Collected Poems; and The Passages of Joy. The Occasions of Poetry was originally published by Faber and Faber.
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A Superb Collection on Formalist and Modernist Poets
Thom Gunn is a wonderful poet and an incisive, elegant prose stylist. This collection of essays from the past 30 years or so is a fine overviewof Gunn's chief interests and ideas.Three essays stand out.First, theessay on the poetry of Thomas Hardy is a brilliant discussion of that poetand novelist's melancholy, aching verse.I learned about several importantpoems that I had read before but that hadn't drawn my deep attention. Gunn's exegesis of those poems is stunningly erudite and useful.Second,Gunn's presentation on the poetry of Fulke Greville is insightful anddeeply inspiring.The work of this fine 16th-century poet deserves to bebetter known.Yvor Winters tried his best to get Greville regarded as oneof the greats, but Gunn has taken that work to the next level by lendinghis unquestionable credibility to an effort to get people to read thereligious, philosophical poetry of Greville, who was chums with Sir PhilipSydney.Third, and best, is the deeply stirring memorial essay on YvorWinters, the controversial critic who stormed around the American literaryscene, mostly and sadly without much effect,in the first half of the lastcentury.Gunn studied with Yvor at Stanford in the late 50s, and hisdepiction of the great and somewhat eccentric (perhaps "exceedinglyintense" is a better phrase) poet and critic is first-rate, even ifyou don't a thing about Winters.There are a number of other distinguishedessays in this book, and every piece offers at least some excellmentcommentary on a variety of writers, many of them modern favorites.Gunnhas been a formalist poet most of his career, and one of the best in myjudgment, though he has worked well in free verse, too.His understandingof poetry, from the viewpoint of one of the finest formalists of our time,is badly needed in this chaotic literary age.You will learn a great dealabout poetry and formal poetry reading Gunn.Some people have been scaredoff from Gunn because he is an open (and almost nonchalantly open)homosexual who has written about the gay experience in his poetry, butdon't permit the idea that Gunn is only a "gay" poet keep youfrom some of the best criticism written during the last 30 years.I am notgay, and I have learned a great deal about poetry and even religious poetryfrom Thom Gunn.We need a lot more critics like him, gay and straight. Give him a try, and don't pass up his poetry either. ... Read more

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In this series, a contemporary poet advocates a poet of the past or present whom they have particularly admired. By their selection of verses and by the personal and critical reactions they express, the selectors offer intriguing insight into their own work. ... Read more

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By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as provide a passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. ... Read more

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This casebook seeks to put in critical perspective the aims and achievements of three leading British poets of the Post-1950 period: Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes and R.S.Thomas. It does not attempt a "definitive" assessment - which would manifestly be a disingenuous approach to poets whose work is continuing to develop in range and technique. By providing a retrospective survey of the critical response to each during the last 30 years or so, it enables the reader to gain a sharper understading of the intrinsic qualities of their poetic art and their relevance to the literary ethos of our own day. ... Read more

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Thom Gunn served as a mouthpiece for his time, illustrating the social, cultural, and historical transformations that have characterized western civilization from World War II until today. Starting with theoretical premises drawn from philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, this work examines Thom Gunn's entire poetic career.In Gunn's early poetry, the author argues, the predominant theme is the desire for freedom from the painful prison of the intellect and from the masks that the individual feels compelled to wear even in his sexual relationships. In Gunn's later poetry, the author notes a gradual opening to human relationships and to Nature, which is also Gunn's vindication and reevaluation of his own nature and the liberation of his long repressed and hidden homosexuality. ... Read more

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The first collection of Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn's prose reflections on the poet's craft.
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