Collected Poems

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Summary: BOTH of the previous reviews are helpful and accurate...
Review: 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.

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Summary: The Evolution of a Great Poet
Review: 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.

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Summary: a truly astounding poet
Review: 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.

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Summary: Comments to add to Jeremy Reed's review...
Review: 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...!