In a happy coincidence both the TLS and the NYRB recently published papers on Thom Gunn, reviewing essays on his poetry as well as a new small collection of poems selected by August Kleinzahler, initially for Faber in 2007, now reprinted in the US (Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, 102p).
Both papers, one by Colm Tóibin, the other by Graeme Richardson, are good introductions to Thom Gunn. Among Gunn's production, Tóibin singles out the following poems "that have about them a slippery beauty, a level of poetic intelligence, which sets them beyond the initial shock of reading them, and beyond any debate about the author's sexuality or his nationality or his doubleness": "The Wound", "In Santa Maria del Popolo", "Considering the Snail", "Touch", and "At the Center". These poems are included in the selection by August Kleinzahler, together with a very good short introduction where he writes:
Gunn
is an Elizabethan poet in modern dress. To be sure, an Elizabethan poet
passed through many filters, historical, cultural, intellectual, not
least the filter of Modernism; but it does no harm when thinking of
Gunn's poetry to think of Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Jonson transposed to
the San Francisco Bay area in the second part of the twentieth century,
living through and making poetic records of the raucous, druggy late
sixties, through to the 'plague' of the late eighties and nineties, and
its aftermath. It's an exciting prospect to conjure with. Gunn is an
exciting poet.
Of course it is tempting to take a look...
2010.02.14
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