The Letters of Thom Gunn

The Letters of Thom Gunn PDF Author: Thom Gunn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 037460570X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. “I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

The Letters of Thom Gunn

The Letters of Thom Gunn PDF Author: Thom Gunn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 037460570X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 525

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. “I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

Breakfast with Thom Gunn

Breakfast with Thom Gunn PDF Author: Randall Mann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226503453
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description
Aubade Those who lack a talent for love have come to walk the long Pier 7. Here at the end of the imagined world are three low-flying gulls like lies on the surface; the slow red of a pilot’s boat; the groan of a fisherman hacking a small shark— and our speech like the icy water, a poor translation that will not carry us across. What brought us west, anyway? A hunger. But ours is no Donner Party, we who feed only on scenery, the safest form of obfuscation: see how the bay is a gray deepening into gray, the color of heartbreak. Randall Mann’s Breakfast with Thom Gunn is a work both direct and unsettling. Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929–2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, the poems are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is “pitiless,” the trees “thin and bloodless,” the words “like the icy water” of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the “graceful erosion” of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, unforgiving subculture. Breakfast with Thom Gunnis at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal. Praise for Complaint in the Garden “We have before us a skillful, witty, passionate young poet. . . . Randall Mann is both attuned to and at odds with the natural world; he articulates the passions and predicaments of a self inside a massive, arousing, but sometimes brutal culture. And he accomplishes these things with buoyant lyric sensibilities and rejuvenating skills.”—Kenyon Review

At the Barriers

At the Barriers PDF Author: Joshua Weiner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226890376
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Maverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn’s verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. The first book-length study of this major poet, At the Barriers surveys Gunn’s career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic. At the Barriers will solidify Gunn’s rightful place in the pantheon of Anglo-American letters.

The Letters of Thom Gunn

The Letters of Thom Gunn PDF Author: Thom Gunn
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571362591
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 682

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Book Description
'Gunn's letters serve as one of the most indispensable epistolary chronicles of an era, especially in the US, of the Eisenhower fifties transforming into the revolutionary sixties and seventies, and then the revanchist, reactionary Reagan eighties and the AIDS epidemic, all seen through the lens of a gay, ex-pat English poet.' August Kleinzahler Gunn was not just the leather jacket-wearing, motorbike-riding tough that he is sometimes made out to be; nor the rambunctiously laughing happy-go-lucky bon vivant that he often showed to the world. This correspondence, meticulously transcribed and annotated by the editors, charts his contradictions and complexities, bringing alive the biographical, political and poetic landscape that informed his imaginative and heroic body of work. The letters demonstrate not only the poet's role-playing and theatricality - recounting in various voices to share his experiences as fully as possible - but also a deep literariness and humane intelligence: friendship, Gunn himself remarks, 'must be the greatest value in my life'.

Boss Cupid

Boss Cupid PDF Author: Thom Gunn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706050
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
A great poet's freshest, most provocative book. He dreams at the center of a closed system, Like the prison system, or a system of love, Where folktale, recipe, and household custom Refer back to the maze that they are of. --from "A System: PCP, or Angel Dust" Taste and appetite are contraposed in Boss Cupid, the twelfth book of poems by the quintessential San Francisco poet, who is also the quintessential craftsman and quintessentially a love poet, though not of quintessential love.Variations on how we are ruled by our desires, these poems make a startling and eloquent gloss on wanton want, moving freely from the story of King David and Bathsheba to Arthur Rimbaud's diet to the tastes of Jeffrey Dahmer. As warm and intelligent as it is ribald and cunning, this collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

Shelf Life

Shelf Life PDF Author: Thom Gunn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780472065417
Category : Literature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The first collection of Anglo-American poet Thom Gunn's prose reflections on the poet's craft.

Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

Selected Poems of Thom Gunn PDF Author: Thom Gunn
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571330061
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Thom Gunn's controlled used of form and the metaphysical was in evidence from his first collection, Fighting Terms, in 1954, which was widely regarded - perhaps not entirely accurately - as a contributor to 'The Movement' and the opposition to modernism. The same technical ability and formal prowess endured after he moved from Cambridge to San Francisco, though became, from The Sense of Movement (1959) onwards, shot through with a new mood of hedonism, freedom and the excesses of the gay and counter-cultural scenes of 1960s America in poems written in celebration of rock and roll, myth, and hallucinogenic drugs. The '80s saw a shift in this life with the devastation of the Aids epidemic, which claimed the lives of a number of Gunn's friends. Many of these friends are memorialised in the moving, passionate and humane collections of his later years; the Forward Prize-winning The Man With the Night Sweats, and Boss Cupid, Gunn's last collection, published in 2000.This Selected Poems, compiled by his friend Clive Wilmer and accompanied by insightful notes, serves to honour a true original, a thrill-seeker in the language, and to exhibit the best of Thom Gunn's electric, powerful, intensely joyful poems.

New Selected Poems

New Selected Poems PDF Author: Thom Gunn
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374220565
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A new selection of poems by the celebrated gay poet Thom Gunn has been described as “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Times Literary Supplement). 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 Francisco—the druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties. Perhaps no contemporary poet was better equipped—by temperament, circumstance, or poetic gift—to engage the subjects of eros and thanatos than Thom Gunn. This New Selected Poems, compiled by his friend Clive Wilmer and accompanied by insightful notes, is the first edition to represent the full arc of Gunn’s inimitable career.

MAN WITH NIGHT SWEATS.

MAN WITH NIGHT SWEATS. PDF Author: THOM. GUNN
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780571392612
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


From the Book of Giants

From the Book of Giants PDF Author: Joshua Weiner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226890511
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 87

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Book Description
Song for Thom Gunn There is no east or west in the wood you fear and seek, stumbling past a gate of moss and what you would not take. And what you thought you had (the Here that is no rest) you make from it an aid to form no east, no west. No east. No west. No need for given map or bell, vehicle, screen, or speed. Forget the house, forget the hill. Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry’s “complex of complaint and praise,” Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son’s baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11.