Collected Poems - Softcover

Gunn, Thom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571171958 ISBN 13: 9780571171958

Publisher: Thom Gunn, 1994

Synopsis

Gunn's work illustrates the debates poetry in English has pursued in this century - form versus improvization, diction versus talk, the American way versus the English tradition, and even, at times, authenticity versus art.

About this title

About the Author:

Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent in 1929. He published his first book of poems, Fighting Terms (1954), while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge. That same year, he moved to California and stayed there for the rest of his life, teaching at Berkeley and living in San Francisco. He published nine books of poetry, including The Man with Night Sweats, which won the Forward Prize for Poetry in 1992, and Boss Cupid (2000). Gunn also published a Collected Poems (1994) and two collections of essays, The Occasions of Poetry (1982) and Shelf Life (1993). He was awarded many major prizes and fellowships from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. Thom Gunn died in 2004.

Review:

"[Gunn] has always been elusive, hard to place both as to nationality and as to poetic affiliation. His "Collected Poems" are sane, accessible, impressive in their versification and command of language--testaments to intelligence, warmth, and integrity."--Richard Tillinghast, "The New York Times Book Review" "[Gunn is] an exceptional and fascinating poet with a formal range to rival Auden's, a sensuality to rival Ginsberg's, and a profound yet daily humanity that surely surpassess that of any other poet of our times . . . [There is] a unity of purpose that extends throughout [this] work, from the watchful early metrics through the syllabics, the reach and skill of the free verse and, in much of the latest work, a return to strong form that might be termed triumphant had it not been called into the service of matter so saddening. Always Gunn has written from that lost and loving center between brain and body, which thinks while it feels, and feels while it learns: that species of po

About this edition

• Publisher: Thom Gunn
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0571171958
• ISBN 13: 9780571171958
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512