Thom Gunn has been described as 'one of the most singular and
compelling poets in English during the past half-century' (TLS).
This Selected Poems, compiled by his friend Clive Wilmer and
accompanied by insightful notes, is the first edition to represent
the full arc of Gunn's inimitable career. 'The poetry of Thom Gunn
was much admired in his lifetime, and at the same time often
misunderstood and underestimated. The scale of his achievement, and
its uniqueness - a masterful Elizabethan lyric poet writing in the
second half of the twentieth century - is just now becoming
properly appreciated. Anonymous in voice, even in the service of
the most intimate subject matter, acute in observation,
particularly the urban experience, with San Francisco the principal
site, Gunn is not merely the poet of the druggy '60s in California
or the plague of the AIDS epidemic, but of the deeper-running
themes, shared by Shakespeare, Baudelaire, William Carlos Williams
and all his greatest exemplars, of the artist's moral and
imaginative engagement with the world as it actually is, in the
broadest possible sense, not as contemporary fashion might have it
be. Which strikes me, who knew and loved the man and poet, as a
kind of heroism.' August Kleinzahler 'Thom Gunn smuggled the lyric
tradition out of post-war Britain, and gave it cool, gracious
renaissance in California. His poetry evokes the wild life of the
body with madrigal-like elegance.' Fiona Sampson 'Gunn's work
illustrates with unusual clarity some of the debates poetry in
English has pursued in [the twentieth] century - form versus
improvisation, diction versus talk, the American way versus the
English tradition, even, at times, authenticity versus art. To
contain these contradictory impulses and . . . to have generated a
body of work which anybody wanting to understand the period and
identify some of its best poems will find essential reading - this
is quite an achievement.' Sean O'Brien
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