Selected Poems

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 Franciscothe druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties. Perhaps no contemporary poet was better equippedby temperament, circumstance, or poetic giftto 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 1979Selected, presenting more of the later work and providing a fuller retrospective account of the breadth and magnitude of Gunn's extraordinary achievement.

Thom Gunn (1929–2004) was educated at Cambridge and had his first collection of poems published while still an undergraduate. He moved to northern California in 1954 and taught at American universities until his death. His last collection was Boss Cupid (FSG, 2000).