Kirjahaku

The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. "I write about love, I write about friendship," remarked Thom Gunn. "I find that they are absolutely intertwined." These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on "one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century" (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn's work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother's suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was educated at Cambridge University, and had his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms, published while still an undergraduate. He moved to northern California in 1954 and taught in American universities until his death. His last collection was Boss Cupid (2000).In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.

'I write about love, I write about friendship,' remarked Thom Gunn: 'I find that they are absolutely intertwined.' These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and shed new light on 'one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century' (Times Literary Supplement).These letters reveal the evolution of Gunn's work and illuminate the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother's suicide; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

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

The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry "I write about love, I write about friendship," remarked Thom Gunn. "I find that they are absolutely intertwined." These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on "one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century" (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn's work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother's suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

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."

This collection covers the span of Thom Gunn's remarkable poetic career over almost forty years. Gunn has made a speciality of playing style against subject as he deals with the out-of-control through tightly controlled meters and with the systematized through open forms.

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 customRefer 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.

"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.

Born and raised in Britain, Thom Gunn has lived in the United States since 1954. He is well known as a poet and is increasingly gaining recognition as a literary critic. Gunn’s main concern in Shelf Life is with twentieth-century American poets, both the famous and the obscure; he also discusses other matters, including the Elizabethans, Christopher Isherwood as man and stylist, and Gunn’s own poetry, which he touches on indirectly in the first two sections of the book and directly in the last. Gunn’s criticism communicates his own enthusiasm for poetry. He tries to show his readers how to get a first foothold into the work of some of his favorite poets, whether Wyatt or Whitman, Mina Loy or Robert Creeley.

Ranging from classical forms to looser more colloquial measures, this collection of poems addresses a daunting range of themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a sequence of poems about the deaths of the poet's friends from AIDS.

This second collection of Gunn's poetry was first published in 1957.

With an illuminating new preface by Colm Tóibín, here is Thom Gunn's extraordinary memorial to love, life and death in the time of the AIDS crisisThe Man With Night Sweats, originally published in 1992, sees Thom Gunn writing at the height of his powers. The collection begins with poems that celebrate love and sex and bodies - whether the exuberance of a swimming otter, the nimble moves of a tow-headed skateboarder or the habituated coming together of two old lovers. In devastating contrast, the poems in the last section are unflinching portraits and accounts of the illness and deaths of friends during the AIDS epidemic. Written out of a lifetime's experience of perfecting his art, these poems are unsurpassed in elegiac intensity and among the most poignant responses to those terrible times.'Gunn has risen to his inescapable new subject with verse of quiddity, depth and terrible truthfulness.' Financial Times'Elegies as unblinking and heartfelt as anything he has written.' The Times