Gunn, Thom

Collected Poems
Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • a truly astounding poet
  • BOTH of the previous reviews are helpful and accurate...
  • Comments to add to Jeremy Reed's review...
  • The Evolution of a Great Poet
Collected Poems
Thom Gunn
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374524335

Amazon.com

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": <blockquote> 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.
</blockquote> 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.

Book Description

One of the best-known and best-loved poets of the English-speaking world, Larkin (1922-85) had only a small number of poems published during his lifetime. Collected Poems, which J. D. McClatchy called "a fascinating and indispensable text" in The New York Times Book Review, brings together not only all of Larkin's published verse--The North Ship (1945), the pamphlet of XX Poems (1953), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974)--but also a vast selection of his uncollected poetry.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars a truly astounding poet.......2002-07-04

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.

5 out of 5 stars BOTH of the previous reviews are helpful and accurate..........2000-09-27

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.

3 out of 5 stars Comments to add to Jeremy Reed's review..........2000-06-04

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...!

5 out of 5 stars The Evolution of a Great Poet.......1999-06-13

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.
The Man with Night Sweats: Poems
Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • Gunn with Feeling!
  • Beautiful, sad, and moving poetry
The Man with Night Sweats: Poems
Thom Gunn
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0374523819

Amazon.com

In the title poem of Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats, the speaker wakes from a nightmare of "mind reduced to hurry" and "flesh reduced and wrecked." In this haunting prelude to his laments for friends lost to AIDS, he explores his own body for damage, and concludes, <blockquote> Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.
</blockquote> As this avalanche of tragedy begins to slide down the hills of Gunn's adopted San Francisco, the poems themselves change form. They cascade from the elegiac couplets of "The J Car," about the decline of a gym owner, into the harrowing free verse of "In Time of Plague," in which the speaker remembers being too "afraid of the strength / of my own health" to indulge with "Brad and John, these fiercely attractive men / who want me to stick their needle in my arm." Gunn's understated emotional weariness is especially compelling when read alongside the book's many songs of innocence. The simple "Seesaw," for example, provides an ars poetica that applies equally to life: "So it ends / as it begins. / Off we climb / And no one wins." Although the specter of plague stands behind much of the book, he maintains the tense prosodic trajectory he's followed since 1954's Fighting Terms. His long California residency aside, Gunn writes the best British poetry of his generation, and The Man with Night Sweats is his finest book to date. --Edward Skoog

Book Description

This volume—a contemporary classic by "one of the most singular and compelling poets in English [of] the past half-century" (Times Literary Supplement)—contains poems written in response to the AIDS crisis. Originally published in 1992, it was Thom Gunn's first book of verse in ten years.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Gunn with Feeling!.......2000-08-09

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 poems deal with AIDS and also drug use. They are not easy to read, and very sad at times. But they deal with problems and subjects most of us have had to face in the last 20 years, whether we liked it or not. There is true feeling and honesty here. I especially enjoyed "In the Time of Plague" and "Memory Unsettled."

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

4 out of 5 stars Beautiful, sad, and moving poetry.......2000-03-29

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 in firm control of difficult subject matter.

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

Not light or easy reading, these poems are sad and sobering. Tears are advised but not required.
The Man with Night Sweats: Poems
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    The Man with Night Sweats: Poems
    Thom Gunn
    Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

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    ASIN: 0374530688
    Release Date: 2007-04-17

    Book Description

    The Man with Night Sweats is a haunting depiction of a world ravaged by illness that is part elegy for those who have been lost and part evocation of the changes that await those who survive. It is also one of the few works of literature that have fully met both the aesthetic and the moral challenges that the AIDS epidemic poses. The nobility and sobriety of Thom Gunn’s forms enhance and underscore the gravity and pathos of his subjects. The results have the cathartic and healing power of great art.
    The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (Poets on Poetry)
    Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    • A Superb Collection on Formalist and Modernist Poets
    The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (Poets on Poetry)
    Thom Gunn
    Manufacturer: University of Michigan Press
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

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    ASIN: 0472085832

    Book Description

    "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.

    Customer Reviews:

    4 out of 5 stars A Superb Collection on Formalist and Modernist Poets.......2000-09-19

    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 overview of Gunn's chief interests and ideas. Three essays stand out. First, the essay on the poetry of Thomas Hardy is a brilliant discussion of that poet and novelist's melancholy, aching verse. I learned about several important poems 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 and deeply inspiring. The work of this fine 16th-century poet deserves to be better known. Yvor Winters tried his best to get Greville regarded as one of the greats, but Gunn has taken that work to the next level by lending his unquestionable credibility to an effort to get people to read the religious, philosophical poetry of Greville, who was chums with Sir Philip Sydney. Third, and best, is the deeply stirring memorial essay on Yvor Winters, the controversial critic who stormed around the American literary scene, mostly and sadly without much effect, in the first half of the last century. Gunn studied with Yvor at Stanford in the late 50s, and his depiction of the great and somewhat eccentric (perhaps "exceedingly intense" is a better phrase) poet and critic is first-rate, even if you don't a thing about Winters. There are a number of other distinguished essays in this book, and every piece offers at least some excellment commentary on a variety of writers, many of them modern favorites. Gunn has been a formalist poet most of his career, and one of the best in my judgment, though he has worked well in free verse, too. His understanding of 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 deal about poetry and formal poetry reading Gunn. Some people have been scared off from Gunn because he is an open (and almost nonchalantly open) homosexual who has written about the gay experience in his poetry, but don't permit the idea that Gunn is only a "gay" poet keep you from some of the best criticism written during the last 30 years. I am not gay, and I have learned a great deal about poetry and even religious poetry from 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.
    Boss Cupid: Poems
    Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    • a weak collection
    • Adventurous
    • ...And taste your boyish glow.
    • Not a Poet!
    • An aging poet becomes stronger and finer!
    Boss Cupid: Poems
    Thom Gunn
    Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

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    ASIN: 0374527717

    Book Description

    A great poet's freshest, most provocative book.

    He dreams at the center of a closed system,
    Like the prison system, or a system of love,
    Where folktale, recipe, and household custom
    Refer back to the maze that they are of.
    --from "A System: PCP, or Angel Dust"

    Taste and appetite are contraposed in Boss Cupid, the twelfth book of poems by the quintessential San Francisco poet, who is also the quintessential craftsman and quintessentially a love poet, though not of quintessential love.Variations on how we are ruled by our desires, these poems make a startling and eloquent gloss on wanton want, moving freely from the story of King David and Bathsheba to Arthur Rimbaud's diet to the tastes of Jeffrey Dahmer. As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

    Download Description

    Warm and intelligent, ribald and cunning, "Boss Cupid" is the twelfth book of poems by the quintessential San Francisco poet.

    Customer Reviews:

    2 out of 5 stars a weak collection.......2001-11-22

    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.

    3 out of 5 stars Adventurous.......2001-02-18

    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.

    5 out of 5 stars ...And taste your boyish glow........2000-07-07

    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'm feeling blue and morbid -- but I purchased "The Man With the Nightsweats" on it's paperback release and have kept it near to hand since. When "Boss Cupid" was published, a friend presented me with the book and I devoured it. It's been nearly two months now, and not a day has gone by that I haven't revisited the book, either by physically reading or musing on its charms. Long live Thom Gunn.

    5 out of 5 stars Not a Poet!.......2000-06-13

    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

    5 out of 5 stars An aging poet becomes stronger and finer!.......2000-04-12

    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.
    The Passages of Joy
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      The Passages of Joy
      Thom Gunn
      Manufacturer: Farrar Straus & Giroux
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Paperback

      GeneralGeneral | Poetry | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
      ASIN: 0374517967
      My Sad Captains and Other Poems
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        My Sad Captains and Other Poems
        Thom Gunn
        Manufacturer: Faber & Faber
        ProductGroup: Book
        Binding: Unknown Binding
        ASIN: B0000CL419
        Jack Straw's castle
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          Jack Straw's castle
          Thom Gunn
          Manufacturer: faber and faber
          ProductGroup: Book
          Binding: Unknown Binding

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          ASIN: 0571109748
          The sense of movement;: [poems
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            The sense of movement;: [poems
            Thom Gunn
            Manufacturer: University Of Chicago Press
            ProductGroup: Book
            Binding: Unknown Binding

            BritishBritish | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books | 18th Century | 19th Century | 20th Century | Classics | Contemporary | General | Historical | Humor | Letters & Correspondence | Middle | Old | Poetry | Renaissance | Shakespeare | Short Stories
            ASIN: B0007EC8PY
            Five American Poets
            Average customer rating: Not rated
              Five American Poets
              Thom & Ted Hughes Eds. Gunn
              Manufacturer: Faber and Faber
              ProductGroup: Book
              Binding: Hardcover
              ASIN: B000MSCUA8

              Authors:

              1. Gzowski, Peter
              2. Gaarder, Jostein
              3. Gaddis, William
              4. Gaiman, Neil
              5. Gaitskill, Mary
              6. Gal, Laszlo
              7. Galen, Nina
              8. Gallagher, Tess
              9. Gallico, Paul
              10. Galloway, Janice

              Authors

              Authors