Collected Poems

by Thom Gunn

Assembles the most noteworthy and characteristic poems of a British-born poet who has lived in the United States since 1954

Genres: Poetry, Queer, Gay, LGBT, 20th Century

495 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

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

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

You are a mound
of bedclothes, where the cat
in sleep braces
its paws against your
calf through the blankets,
and kneads each paw in turn.

Listening to the String Quartet 15 by Shostakovich. My paws although kneaded appear dry. It is another morning. This tome was another splendid gift from my wife. It was another birthday. There was hummus. I read this in three bounds spread over the same number of weeks. Perhaps it was ill-timed to return to this so close after I finished Poems 1959-2009 but alas I was charmed last night despite my fatigue, despite my disillusion as to what work is like for now. Heralded perhaps by the imminent trip to Canada I enjoyed Gunn's counterpoint between his birthplace of Kent and his adult nest of San Francisco during the dark times. I especially liked his plan for a day with his brother, an explication via day trip. I have memories of my own regarding my brother Tim. Unlike Seidel, Gunn doesn't fan his fancy (or fancy his fanny?) with aplomb but marvels and mourns in equal measure.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 two:
Ferocity existing in the fence
Built by an exercised intelligence.

The poem is Augustan in its form, Latinate in its diction, and philosophic in its argument, yet it feels warm and humane throughout. In this respect, the poem reminds me of Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”—another homage to a public intellectual. Like Auden’s, Gunn’s poem is elegiac. Though Winters would not die for another thirteen years, Gunn is already aware that “night is always close, complete negation/ Ready to drop on wisdom and emotion.” The poem knows that the mind is as mortal as the body and so turns for its consolation to teaching: the dissatisfied urge to “raise from the excellent the better still.”

It is all the more moving to me then that some of the last great poems of the collection are elegies to Charlie Hinkle, one of Gunn’s graduate students, who died of AIDS in the late 1980’s. Written in the same iambic pentameter couplets in which he wrote “To Yvor Winters, 1955”—and so many of his other long meditations—“The J Car” also mourns the loss of a great mind, one that must suffer the knowledge that “he would not write the much-conceived/ Much-hoped-for work now.” But the bulk of the poem’s attention is on the body, on the life of sensations that dissipates slowly with the body’s diminishment. Gunn describes meals he shared with his friend in the last year of his life, meals during which “the connection between life and food/ Had briefly seemed so obvious if so crude.” He notes the painful contrast between his friend’s sickness and his own health, including such details as “I’d eat his dessert” as if shy of presenting his visits in a saintly light, yet he doesn’t let the narrative tip into self-indulgent assertions of guilt either. In a similar display of tact, he steers away from the emotional traps inherent in elegy, mourning his friend without idealizing him, achieving a tone to match his friend’s taste for food like Sauerbraten “In which a sourness and dark richness meet.”

[click on the first comment on this review for the last paragraph]

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 5 out of 5]

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) exhibit a love of the form itself, a playfulness at the peak of craft.

[Andrew H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gunn never wanes -- still as important as ever.

[David M · Rating 5 out of 5]

SAN FRANCISCO STREETS

I've had my eye on you
For some time now.
You're getting by
Not quite sure how.

But as you go along
You're finding out
What different city streets
Are all about.

Peach country was your home.
When you went picking
You ended every day
With peach fuzz sticking
All over face and arms
Intimate, gross,
Itching like family,
And far too close.

But when you came to town
And when you first
Hung out on Market Street
That was the worst:
Tough little group of boys
Outside Flagg's Shoes.
You learned to keep your cash.
You got tattoos.

Then by degrees you rose
Like country cream -
Hustler to towel boy,
Bath house and steam;
Tried being kept a while
But felt confined,
One brass bad driving you
Out of your mind.

Later on Castro Street
You got new work
Selling chic jewelry.
And as sales clerk
You have at last attained
To middle class.
(No one on Castro Street
Peddles his ass.)

You gaze out from the store.
Watching you watch
All the men strolling by
I think I catch
Half-veiled uncertainty
In your expression.
Good looks and great physiques
Pass in procession.

You've risen up this high -
How, you're not sure.
Better remember what
Makes you secure.
Fuzz is still on the peach,
Peach on the stem.
Your looks looked after you
Look after them.

*
(I can recognize what Harold Bloom might call the superior poetic endowment of, say, Rilke or Ashbery, but no poem has ever hit closer to home for me than this. The perfect five star rating is really for this one poem.)

[John O'Malley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poet for the lamented...beautiful sadness

[atito · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was an education & sometimes those happen to be bitter. i was ready to love this--gay, san francisco detail, meter & rhyme, & beloved by a mentor/friend. but as i flipped and flipped i found the poems somewhat dead or distant until halfway through--i copied lines to my notebook and there too they seemed morose or "poetic" with little vivacity--even in transcription i was not holding my breath as i find i do often. the first few collections with virile imagery and "poses" are duds & rely on formal musculature to fill vacuity; the humor throughout is good until it is absolutely off-key, esp when there is no audience to laugh and so prop up the material; the "willpower" (or willfulness?) to become, to expose and so to change, is uncertain, vague, and possibly only there for a "lyrical" stretch towards some truth-content; the poems about lsd are wildly unsurprising; and (the worst of all) the flower writing is only occasionally moving... i read articles and dissertation chapters to supply the empty spots but the poems remained aloof. it's not all a loss and at the end i found i still transcribed a fair amount--besides "the man with night sweats," which seems to me the superior collection as it does i think to most others, i also quite enjoyed "moly" and parts of "the passages of joy"--but man, can't help but feel like i walk away from this with a definite loss, of watching other people pour their hearts into a reserve i feel is invisible or out of reach. but it is maybe a good exercise in remembering what makes a poem good for me--i have opened myself so often to being disarmed that it has become second-nature, that moment of absolute vertigo in someone else's line breaks

[Matt Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read "Black Jackets" or "On the Move" first. The perfect synthesis of observations of common, everyday things and people and intense, high-level, meaning-of-life philosophical musing. He was a genius.

[federico garcía LOCA · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this on and off for a year, really enjoyed the San Fransisco-ness of those later poems and the, I’m assuming, London-ness of the earlier ones. Gunn is a master rhymer, and wrote many simple sweet favorites

[Wuttipol✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Santa Maria del Popolo (1958)

Waiting for when the sun an hour or less
Conveniently oblique makes visible
The painting on one wall of this recess
By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
I see how shadow in the painting brims
With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs,
Until the very subject is in doubt.
 
But evening gives the act, beneath the horse
And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,
Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,
Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.
O wily painter, limiting the scene
From a cacophony of dusty forms
To the one convulsion, what is it you mean
In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?
 
No Ananias croons a mystery yet,
Casting the pain out under name of sin.
The painter saw what was, an alternate
Candor and secrecy inside the skin.
He painted, elsewhere, that firm insolent
Young whore in Venus’ clothes, those pudgy cheats,
Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,
For money, by one such picked off the streets.
 
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 —
For the large gesture of solitary man,
Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

[Xavier · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Dominic · Rating 4 out of 5]

hard to rate someone's collected poems, some books in it certainly weren't as high but I couldn't give it any less as it contained 'night sweats, which is beautiful

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow.