Collected Poems (Paperback)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Thom Gunn has always known how to refresh his sight. His Collected Poems offers startling and capacious poems that haven't appeared before in book form--poems that make a case that there is no such thing as a typical Thom Gunn poem, such as "At the Barriers" and "Confessions of a 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 work stands distinct from many of his contemporaries in that he has used form in the service of lyrical, not pathological, intensity (see "Expression"). Always the tragedian, never the tragic figure, he knows that vision requires vigilance. His patient watchfulness has allowed him to assemble a body of lyric poems that compose a condensed social history of the times. He has never backed away from the tough philosophical position put forth in his great early poem "The Annihilation of Nothing": "It is despair that nothing cannot be.... Neither firm nor free, / Purposeless matter hovers in the dark."

Gunn's poems untwist the conundrum of knowing and transform it into wisdom--that which is beyond the self, beyond the mediating circumstance. His is poetry that you can turn to in the dead of night for hard words that do not exclude.

From The Washington Post

Thom Gunn, who died in April at the age of 74, was a lively Anglo-American poet with a warm heart and a cool head, a rare combination. His rigorous intelligence and sympathetic imagination are everywhere in evidence in his 12 books of poems.

Poetry on both sides of the Atlantic has been enriched by his Collected Poems, which brings together nearly four decades of work from his assured first book, Fighting Terms (1954), to his sunlit middle collection, Moly (1971), to his magisterial book of elegies, The Man With Night Sweats (1992). His final collection, Boss Cupid (2000), suggests that this excellent verse technician was, in the end, a provocative gay love poet.

Gunn was a transplanted British writer who identified strongly with San Francisco, his adopted home town. He studied with the poetic rationalist Yvor Winters at Stanford (the Library of America recently published his excellent edition of Winters's Selected Poems), who ingrained in him a permanent sense of the rigor and balance of the Elizabethan plain style. As he wrote in a tribute poem to Winters:

You keep both Rule and Energy in view,
Much power in each, most in the balanced two:
Ferocity existing in the fence
Built by an exercised intelligence.

What he concluded about his former teacher is also eminently true of himself: "For all his respect for the rules of poetry, it is not the Augustan decorum he came to admire but the Elizabethan, the energy of Nashe, Greville, Gascoigne, and Donne, plain speakers of little politeness."

Gunn was very much at home in the traditional meters of English poetry, though he also liked to experiment with syllabic stanzas and looser free verse rhythms, with what he called "openness." He had "little politeness," and part of the shock of his work is the way he employed a plain style and traditional English meters to write about the contemporary urban life he found in California -- about drugs and panhandlers, gay bars and tattoo parlors. There is a powerful dialectic -- a high tension -- running throughout his work between raw anarchistic energy and powerful intellectual control. His poems enact an ongoing struggle to keep Rule and Energy in right relation, proper balance.

Gunn insisted on the continuity between England and America, between meter and free verse, between epiphanic vision and everyday consciousness. His existential rebelliousness was tempered by a sense of our common humanity. I would say that his Elizabethan manner reached its peak in his sequence of elegies for friends who died during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s. Here is a memorial lyric for his friend Larry Hoyt, whose life was too early stilled:

Still Life
I shall not soon forget
The greyish-yellow skin
To which the face had set:
Lids tight: nothing of his,
No tremor from within,
Played on the surfaces.
He still found breath, and yet
It was an obscure knack.
I shall not soon forget
The angle of his head,
Arrested and reared back
On the crisp field of bed,
Back from what he could neither
Accept, as one opposed,
Nor, as a life-long breather,
Consentingly let go,
The tube his mouth enclosed
In an astonished O.

By Edward Hirsch

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 30, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374524335
• ISBN-13: 978-0374524333
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #674,684 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Evolution of a Great Poet, June 13, 1999

By	JEREMY REED c/o [e-mail] (London, GB) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Collected Poems (Hardcover)

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 surprisingly conventional forms.

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

Taking up residence in the United States in 1954, Gunn soon got turned on to a variety of recreational drugs, including LSD. Clearly, these experiences proved a catalyst, 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-Boy culture of the late 50's, employing motorbikes and Elvis as distinctly valid, modern subjects for poetry. Gunn's telling lines in the poem "Elvis Presley" could also be read as a credo for his own evolving poetics:

"He turns 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 the allegorical poems from his first two books still draw on unsurprising themes and employ myth and religion rather conventionally to explore their subjects, a liberating undertow of defiance is everywhere present. In "High Fidelity", a poem about listening to records, Gunn's metaphysical playfulness works to impose reason on an emerging pop culture:

"I play your furies back to me at night,/ The needle dances in the grooves they made,/ For fury is passion like love, and fury's bite/ These grooves, no sooner than a love mark fades..."

By the time Gunn published Moly in 1971, he was deeply involved in the west coast rock scene of outdoor festivals and psychedelic happenings, and his work took on a spacey, almost visionary quality. Poems like "Tom-Dobin," "The Colour Machine," "Street Song," "The Fair In The Woods," "The Messenger," and "At the Centre" are all examples of a poetry siding with altered states. Gunn writes about his LSD experiences with remarkable clarity:

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

Gunn's first five collections, represented in the first half of Collected Poems, gave little indication of his coming out as a gay man. The acid landscape of Moly, however, seems to have provided a space of psychological transition necessary for the poet to write more explicitly about his sexuality. Since Jack Straw's Castle (1976), his work has been explicitly informed by the details of his engagement with the gay subculture and its interactions with the culture at large. It is also more explicit about his interior emotional landscape.

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

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

In Thom Gunn's incarnation as a compassionate, deeply humane elegist to dying friends, his touch is neither too grave nor too light. Steeped in 17th century poetry-a period rich in the elegist's art-he proved himself as adept at writing formal couplets in the celebration of the dying or the dead as he had at writing free verse. "The Missing" is a particularly successful late poem in Gunn's canon. In it, he perceives himself as belonging to a universal gay family, a resilient but continuously reduced nucleus in which survival is all.

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

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

An outsider to British poetry by reason of place and sensibility, Gunn is, to me, the most exciting poet of his generation. The Collected Poems is the place to get at the whole body of work of a poet who continues to surprise, who celebrates those who live on the cutting edge of social and sexual issues in our crazily up-ended, but always meaningful world.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BOTH of the previous reviews are helpful and accurate..., September 26, 2000

By	"annclpoet" (Gainesville, FL USA) - See all my reviews

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.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Comments to add to Jeremy Reed's review..., June 3, 2000

By	"thelessdeceived" (Oxford, OXON United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

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 and others from A Sense of Movement).

2) Gunn is generally successful, but in limited aims. Consequently contemporaries like Larkin are consistently more powerful. It is unfair to judge it by a greatness it doesn't pretend to.

3) The surprise expressed at the conventional form is telling. Gunn does 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 a Novel is not everywhere present. Whilst he gains a greater freedom with his cultural and pharmaceutical roamings, he needs greater discipline to achieve either classical or romantic virtues. It is hard to tell which he aspires to.

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

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