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65th out of 161 books
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Collected Poems
by
Thom Gunn
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 ...more
Paperback, 496 pages
Published
April 30th 1995
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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I'll bet you money that our great-grandchildren will study Thom Gunn in school. He had a talent for adapting warm and deep observations of his world - drugs, cruising, fistfights, leathersex, addicts freaking out on the bus, graduate students and close friends dying of AIDS in the 80s and 90s - to traditional formal structures and rhyme schemes that lent them a timeless quality, hearkening gently to Petrarchan sonnets, medieval descriptions of madmen shouting truths in filth-strewn streets, thir...more
The first of the poems in Thom Gunn’s Collected to really knock me out appears half way through his second book, The Sense of Movement (1957). In the poem, “To Yvor Winters, 1955,” Gunn pays homage to his former teacher with a portrait of the Stanford professor that compares his training of Airedale terriers—an activity that requires “boxer’s vigilance and poet’s rigour”—to his life as a scholar who must
…keep both Rule and Energy in view,
Much power in each, most in the balanced...more
…keep both Rule and Energy in view,
Much power in each, most in the balanced...more
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Gunn is my favorite San Francisco poet (originally from Kent, England), who died a couple years ago. I met him a few times: he was unfailing courteous, without a speck of condescension, as roguish and charming as his poetry. He loved San Francisco, but you sensed he'd have been equally at home in a tavern with Marlowe or at a court entertainment with Greville.
Biography aside — even his darkest poems (as in The Man with Night Sweats from the early 90s when AIDS was killing his friends...more
Biography aside — even his darkest poems (as in The Man with Night Sweats from the early 90s when AIDS was killing his friends...more
I wanted to like these poems more than I did...maybe I read them at a point in my life when I wasn't quite ready for their more formal aspects. Gunn is heavy on meter & rhyme. I might give these a re-read sometime and see how they sit now.
I like Tom Gunn, he's a local San Franciscan poet. If you want to read up on his work, this volume would be a good buy. I'm not sure if it's in here, but his poem The Man With the Night Sweats is touching as it is frightening.
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