Boss Cupid: Poems

A Great Poet's Freshest, Most Provocative Book Cadets and skinheads, city boys, young Spartans Wait poised like ballet-dancers in the wings To join the balance of the corps in dances Passion has planned. They that have power, or seem to, They that have power to hurt, they are the constructs Of their own longing, born on the edge of sleep, Imperfectly understood. --from "A Wood near Athens" This is the twelfth book of poems--the first since The Man with Night Sweats--by the quintessential San Francisco poet, who is also the quintessential contemporary formalist and quintessentially a love poet, though not of quintessential love. These poems--essentially variations on how we are ruled by our desires--make a startlingly 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 new collection of Thom Gunn's is his richest yet.

Literature & Fiction

GUNN, Thom

Poetry

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Collected Poems

Assembles the most noteworthy and characteristic poems of a British-born poet who has lived in the United States since 1954

Farrar. Straus & Giroux

Octavo. 78 pages. poems grouped in 3 sections. acknowledgments. 5.7" x 8.5" lavender-violet cloth boards in colorful DJ.

Jack Straw's Castle and Other Poems

This volumeâ€”a contemporary classic by "one of the most singular and compelling poets in English [of] the past half-century" (Times Literary Supplement)â€”contains poems written in response to the AIDS crisis. Originally published in 1992, it was Thom Gunn's first book of verse in ten years.

The Man with Night Sweats

Farrar, Straus

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.

New Selected Poems

History & Criticism

"For me the act of writing is an exploration, a reaching out, an act of trusting search for the correct incantation that will return me certain feelings whenever I want them. And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations." --Thom GunnThom Gunn is well-known as a poet, and increasingly as a literary critic. The Occasions of Poetry includes insightful critical pieces on writers ranging from William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder to Thomas Hardy and Robert Duncan. "The occasion in all cases," writes Gunn, "is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true." The first loyalty of a writer who is "true to his occasions," he writes, must be to the facts of experience.The book includes five autobiographical essays, which combine to form an engaging account of the author's development as a poet and to chronicle some of the most significant literary currents of recent decades, both in England and America.Thom Gunn, born in England in 1929, has lived in America since 1954. His books include Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview; The Man with Night Sweats; Collected Poems; and The Passages of Joy. The Occasions of Poetry was originally published by Faber and Faber.

The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism & Autobiography

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Poems in free verse and meter explore the experiences of the author and present observations on life, relationships, and happiness

The Passages of Joy

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 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, edited and with an introduction by the poet August Kleinzahler, supplants the 1979 Selected, presenting more of the later work and providing a fuller retrospective account of the breadth and magnitude of Gunn's extraordinary achievement.

Selected Poems

Reference

Moly and My Sad Captains

His sixth book of poetry. Poems about his native England, northern California and imaginary spaces, spanning the personal, pastoral, material and transcendental.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GUNN, Thom. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by GUNN, Thom

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GUNN, Thom. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Boss Cupid: Poems

Collected Poems

Jack Straw's Castle and Other Poems

The Man with Night Sweats

New Selected Poems

The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism & Autobiography

The Passages of Joy

Selected Poems

Moly and My Sad Captains

Jack Straw's Castle and Other Poems