Collected Poems

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.

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 indicati