New Selected Poems
Thom Gunn, Ed. Clive Wilmer
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
New Selected Poems
Thom Gunn, Ed. Clive Wilmer
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
[A] fine, vital, note-enriched edition.
Clive Wilmer...is Gunn’s most devoted and judicious, perceptive and illuminating critic. The sources for his extensive introduction and notes include Gunn’s unpublished papers, notebooks, diaries, and letters in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. But Gunn’s poetic mine is so rich with allusions and echoes, which enhance and fortify his work, that more ore can still be found.
Wilmer’s informative and carefully annotated book is more interested in representing the arc of Gunn’s career as it relates to his life, framing his work through illuminating biographical material.
A new must-have for all LGBTQIA libraries everywhere! But it’s not meant to stay on the shelf, no. This new selection, edited by Thom Gunn’s friend Clive Wilmer, has been thoughtfully designed to be held and read, studied and enjoyed, page by page. It doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive or definitive; instead, it’s a splendid introduction to Gunn’s poetry, with a smart sampling of his work over the many years, which slowly brings the reader into Gunn’s large and restless world.
Clive Wilmer’s choices in a new Selected are judicious, while his introduction and notes are full of new material culled from Gunn’s letters, notebooks and archives.
A compendious selected volume drawn from 11 of Gunn’s books, and his crisp introduction fills in many biographical gaps in the life of one of the finest poets in the English language.
There are some poems I miss in Wilmer’s selection.
Encountering a sampling from Gunn’s 1992 masterpiece The Man with Night Sweats within the broader context of his career is a shock to the system, no matter how aware the reader is of the mercurial literary life that led up to it.