Selected Poems [Paperback]

Thom Gunn (Author), August Kleinzahler (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0374258597 | ISBN-13: 978-0374258597 | Publication Date: March 31, 2009 | Edition: First Edition

Thom Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there’s nothing archaic, quaint, or sepia-toned about his poetry. His method was dispassionate and rigorous, uniquely well suited for making a poetic record of the tumultuous time in which he lived. Gunn’s dozens of brilliantly realized poems about nature, friendship, literature, sexual love, and death are set against the ever-changing backdrop of San Francisco—the druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties. Perhaps no contemporary poet was better equipped—by temperament, circumstance, or poetic gift—to engage the subjects of eros and thanatos than Thom Gunn. This new Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by the poet August Kleinzahler, supplants the 1979 Selected, presenting more of the later work and providing a fuller retrospective account of the breadth and magnitude of Gunn’s extraordinary achievement.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Serious readers of contemporary poetry who agreed on nothing else could agree to admire Thom Gunn. When Gunn died, age 75, in 2004, critics in his native England remembered a tough young writer who gained fast fame in the 1950s, whose cool pentameters praised motorcycles and Elvis; Americans remembered the certainly learned, and yet perpetually youthful poet who made San Francisco his permanent home, a celebrant of gay life in the 1970s, and an elegist of HIV and AIDS in the 1990s, his extreme topics subjected to remarkable formal control. Kleinzahler (Sleeping It Off in Rapid City)-another San Francisco writer, and a friend of Gunn's for decades-has put together a slender, effective selection, from early set pieces ("On the Move") to midcareer retrospectives like "Autobiography" ("The sniff of the real, that's/ what I'd want to get") through the valedictory poems of Boss Cupid (2000), with its long-delayed, careful response to Gunn's mother's suicide. Gunn "became more adventurous as he grew older," says Kleinzahler's avid introduction, and the whole of the poems bear him out. The introduction, and the choice among poems, emphasizes Gunn's adventurous range in technique-quatrains, trimeter stanzas, meticulous free verse, and so on-more than it shows his sometimes adventurous life: Gunn wrote of dance clubs, street protests, drugs, and sex, but also about grief, care and personal loyalty. Though the volume seems too brief, the whole of Gunn's power shines through. He could find many more readers now.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* Hailed as one of the most promising English poets of his generation for his first collection, Fighting Terms (1954), Gunn fell off the British poetical map after his only slightly less well-received follow-up, The Sense of Movement (1957). By then, he had removed himself physically from his homeland to San Francisco, where he lived out his life, slowly becoming the most important gay poet in English of the twentieth century. Editor Kleinzahler notes Gunn’s splash debut and peremptory early dismissal but demonstrates that Gunn’s work steadily improved and never diminished. He continued to emulate the elegance of the Elizabethan lyric, the plain style of Ben Jonson, Baudelaire’s interest in the urban demimonde, and the devotion to honesty and art of his American teacher, Yvor Winters (Gunn published a superb selection of Winters in 2003). While he kept his personality out of the poems—I in them is an observer, more empathic as the years go by—he never parsed his feelings but described what his senses told him so as to vividly conjure the moment and its significance. He became a nonpareil poet of death in the midst of life, and the selections here from The Man with Night Sweats (1992) outweigh the rest of the literature about AIDS, in particular. He is also a great poet of love (read “Touch”) and more. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (March 31, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374258597
• ISBN-13: 978-0374258597
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #599,761 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the half-dozen great poets of the Twentieth Century, February 12, 2010

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Ronald V. Mershart (Superior, WI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Selected Poems (Paperback)

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.