Collected Poems

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

Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent in 1929. After National Service and a short time living in Paris, he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English. He published his first book of poems, Fighting Terms, while he was still an undergraduate. In 1954 he moved to San Francisco and held a one-year Fellowship at Stanford University. He published over thirty books of poetry, including The Man with Night Sweats, which won the Forward Prize for Poetry in 1992, and Boss Cupid (2000). Thom Gunn died in 2004