Selected Poems 1950-1975

by Thom Gunn

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.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1979

About the author

Thom Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004), born Thomson William Gunn, was an Anglo-American poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn wrote about gay-related topics—particularly in his most famous work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992—as well as drug use, sex, and his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm itching to christen Thom Gunn the "Poet of the Hug." His poems, like hugs, are dependable and steady, marked by cool consistency and mellow humanistic sympathies. He has a few poems about hugs, too---most notably, the aptly titled "The Hug," which wistfully describes a platonic embrace shared by two ex-lovers who are now "just friends." There's also the stately lyric "Baucis and Philemon," which contains the lines "Two trunks like bodies, bodies like twined trunks,/Supported by their wooden hug." The famous poem "The Man With the Night Sweats" features a speaker who has HIV/AIDS: "I am/Hugging my body to me/As if to shield it from/The pains..." And the collection ends with the poem "In Trust," which concerns a romantic relationship in which one of the two partners is always off traveling somewhere:

"...As you began
You'll end the year with me.
We'll hug each other while we can,
Work or stray while we must.
Nothing is, or will ever be,
Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart,
But what we hold in trust,
We do hold, even apart."

Gunn's poems evoke a flint-hard, leather-clad, atheistic universe in which there is no higher power than the human will. Many of Gunn's poems explicitly celebrate the human will: for example, "On the Move," an early poem that lionizes a California motorcycle gang in rhymed iambic pentameter (!), and "To Yvor Winters, 1955," a poem that praises Gunn's writing mentor Winters for using his human will to exert control over his natural surroundings despite the unremitting threat of impending death and entropy. Each of these poems uses the word "will" not once, but twice, within the space of less than 2 pages.

In Gunn's anti-Romantic world, what separates the poet from the layman is not passion, a shudder of epiphany, or a lightning-bolt of divine inspiration. Rather, the poet's defining characteristic is his self-disciplined ability to fine-tune his perceptive faculties, his ability to see things exactly as they are. Over and over, in poems like "Waking in a Newly Built House" and "Flying Above California," Gunn foregrounds the virtues of "precision," "accuracy," and "exactitude." In "Considering the Snail," he counsels his readers not to hastily dismiss a poem just because it is not dripping with the overheated fervor that we have been taught to expect from poetry:

"The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes...

What is a snail's fury? All
I think is that if later
I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
of that deliberate progress."

Gunn's poems are always painstakingly crafted, linear and rational like his agemate Philip Larkin's. Even when Gunn sets out to chronicle a seemingly anarchic event, such as the experience of taking LSD, he never deviates from his core principles of deliberateness and descriptive precision, situating himself as a voice of reason bearing witness to an era of chaos and despair.

[John Anthony · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

I really struggled with this and found it hard to relate to many of the poems here. Perhaps I was in the wrong mood. I’m sure I have read work by him before quite successfully.

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like going to a new restaurant in a new city and ordering something extravagently new to you. Eating slowly, and then having coffee.

Thank you, Thom Gunn, for bringing that strange land of 1960s 70s San Francisco to me on my Ohio front porch. August Kleinzahler talks about Gunn coming to write more and more of the city, but I heard him caring about what lies around it: the grasses, small birds, dust, clouds, and the naked at the naked beaches.

[Yllacaspia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favourite books of poetry, ever. Touch, the Hug, and In Trust in particular bring tears to my eyes every time.

[Luigi Sposato · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant poems about what makes life so beautiful, and frustratingly awful.

[Eric Sutton · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable collection by a British poet who, like Larkin, uses traditional forms to write of contemporary life. Unlike Larkin, Gunn is a bit more formalized with his language, less crass, I guess. I read a review of his poem "Slow Waker" in The Guardian recently - a beautiful poem about burgeoning youth - and though it isn't included in this collection, I found many of the poems to be of a similar ilk: evocative and full of longing.

[zara meadows · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard a Gunn poem read in a seminar during work experience in the Literature department of a university, and a month later in New York I picked this up. I liked and enjoyed the earlier poems; however I found none of them to be breathtaking or memorable. The real breathtaking work comes in around 1976, with ‘Jack Straw’s Castle.’ The poem ‘Autobiography’ is absolutely wondrous and was the first poem in here to capture me the way poetry should. Most of the poetry I loved in here can be found in his 1992 collection ‘The Man With Night Sweats,’ which I hoped to pick up, for poems like ‘Lament,’ ‘The J Car’ and ‘Still Life’ were the real standouts of this comprised selection of Gunn’s best and most popular work. It’s worth nothing that I loved many of the poems selected from Gunn’s last collection ‘Boss Cupid’ (2000) including ‘My Mother’s Pride’ and ‘The Gas-poker,’ which show the poet candidly open up about the circumstances of his mother’s suicide; these poems have a Plath-air about them which I devoured. ‘The Dump’ and ‘In Trust’ were the perfect closers for this collection which is carefully constructed to build to a satisfying peak and filled with the intimacies and complexities of the life of a wildly interesting yet level-headed poet - it’s almost like the dump described in the penultimate poem: ‘i clambered up the highest/pile and found myself/looking across not history/but the vistas of a steaming/range of garbage/reaching to the coast itself.’

[S.B. Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thom Gunn has been one of the happy discoveries wrought by my self imposed regime to read more poetry and to read more widely. I can’t remember how I stumbled across the name but I am glad that I did.

I am very glad to have picked up this particular Selected Poems edited by August Kleinzahler, because I think, in my limited knowledge of the poet, that Kleinzahler has done a very good job of presenting a cross section of Gunn’s work. I also found the introduction by Kleinzahler to be one of the best I have read in a book of selected poetry in recent times. I was left with a very well rounded sense of the poet. While that in itself was not necessary for enjoyment, I felt it beneficial nonetheless.

.read more..

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyment of a specific poem is such a subjective thing. I do understand the skill needed to create rhyme patterns, but to my mind, that structure can get in the way of a fuller expressive freedom and/or the reader's ease of understanding. Even though I quite liked a few poems from this collection, most just did not resonate, largely due to the formal rhyming structures. My favorite poems: the short "The Night Piece," couplet-rhymed "Lament," autobiographical "The Gas-poker" (Gunn's mother's suicide during his childhood), and the relationship-related "In Trust."

[May Jeong]

you go from me
in june for months on end
to study equanimity
among the high trees alone
i go out with a new boyfriend
and stay all summer in the city where
home mostly on my own
i watch the sunflowers flare

and from the hall a doorway gives
a glimpse of you, writing i don't know what
through winter, with head bent
in the lamp's yellow spot

saccharine and exactly right.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read #1
Started on October 15, 2014
Finished on October 22, 2014

Just had to go ahead and finish this even though we have one more week of Gunn in my class. His poetry is tied with Larkin at the moment. Really enjoyed this.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel
To the dim interior of the church instead,
In which there kneel already several people,
Mostly old women: each head closeted
In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.
Their poor arms are too tired for more than this"
(from "In Santa Maria del Popolo")

[Sarah]

The formality of his verse is pretty stunning (extremely complex schemes of rhyming and meter), but aside from my admiration for his technical mastery, I'm not moved by Thom Gunn's poetry so far.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Thom Gunn!

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

gosh, do you ever stop reading a poem? i will come back and review after i've read through these a few more dozen times.

[Paul Wilner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collection; piercingly acute introduction by August Kleinzahler.

[Paul Kerschen]

California rigor! It's possible! But this edition omits many great middle-period poems ("At the Centre", "Misanthropos").