Selected Poems

Thom Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, even in his free-verse poetry. But there's nothing archaic, quaint, or sepia-toned about the poetry. It is the Elizabethan voice and method passed through the filter of modernity, and with all the tricks of high modernism at hand when the poet chooses to make use of them. Gunn's method was dispassionate and rigorous, uniquely well suited for making a poetic record of the tumultuous times he lived through in the San Francisco Bay Area: the druggy, anarchic, politically charged '60s, and, especially for the gay community of which he was very much a part, the plague that was AIDS in the '80s and after. In between and among those large social events are dozens of brilliantly realized poems about nature, along with meditations on friendship, literature, sexual love, and death. Of these last two themes, no contemporary poet comes to mind who was better equipped--by temperament, circumstance, or poetic gift--to engage the subjects of "eros "and "thanatos. "This new "Selected Poems," edited and with an introduction by the poet August Kleinzahler, supplants the earlier, 1979 "Selected," presenting more of the later work and providing a fuller, retrospective account of the breadth and magnitude of Gunn's extraordinary achievement.