Thom Gunn Books

This translation is inspiring! One of the few translations to include the Holy Name Yahweh. I regret that possible future editions will revert back to using Lord rather than using Yahweh. Get this treasure while you can.

The bibles I ordered are for my friends. I have my own for long time. The package was poorly done and the dust covers were damaged and I feel bad to present to my friends as a gift. Wish you can do better in packing the books.

Disregard the nay sayers who have rated this bible under 4 stars. They have no grasp of what an accurate translation is. This is the most accurate, easy to read bible you will ever see. It restores to the text the name of God in the seven some odd thousand times it appeared in the Old Testament (or Hebrew scriptures). This fact can be easily confirmed with the Strong's Concordance. It transliterates the word "Sheol" in place of the King James words, "Grave, Hell, and Pit". This lets the reader make up his or her own mind regarding the controversial subject of Hell, avoiding any outside, sectarian bias. It contains few distracting and unnecessary references which would serve only to keep the reader from learning God's word in a natural, undirected way, absent of religious influence. Buy it. I believe you'll be happy you did.

Wonderful translation that uses modern English. It is easy to understand and the translators seek to emphasize the meaning of the scripture more than its exact literal translation. It preserves the divine name in the Hebrew texts (Yahweh) but fails to use it in the Greek texts. It includes the apochryphal writings which is good or bad depending on your view of these writings. I truly enjoy reading this translation.

The Bible is the most read book in the world. But this particular translation is in our current English Language, not an old translation. It is easy to read. The material is good and the size is ideal. God Bless you all!!

Thom Gunn is definitely one of my favorite poets, and this book collects his work up to _The Man with Night Sweats_, which is one of the better poetry collections there are. Gunn is a very uneven poet, and when he is bad, he is truly awful. But he has some of the best poems I've read. And this collection is a fun one to read, one best read slowly, over a long period of time, so that it can be savored. Gunn writes well in both free and formal verse, and he does interesting things with syllabics. He is one of the best poets we have.

One of the most exciting and challenging bodies of poetry created over the past forty years, Thom Gunn's Collected Poems offers a heady Anglo-American cocktail of liberal sensuality, often contained within surprisingly conventional forms.

Gunn's poetry is characterised by a cool sense of intellectual detachment, and a penetratingly lucid ability to follow experience to its resolvable core. This sensibility is offered in disarmingly casual, laid-back tones inherited from post-60's American poetry. Gunn successfully pulled off that rare and necessary trick of re-inventing himself through American poetry, thus bypassing the pedestrianism which blighted so many of his British contemporaries. This ongoing re-invention and self-resurrection is one of the most interesting and inspiring subtexts of his Collected Poems.

Taking up residence in the United States in 1954, Gunn soon got turned on to a variety of recreational drugs, including LSD. Clearly, these experiences proved a catalyst, shifting the terrain of Gunn's work. Yet right from the start, Gunn had presented an angular, leather-cased shoulder to social convention. In The Sense Of Movement (1957), he sided with the Beat and Teddy-Boy culture of the late 50's, employing motorbikes and Elvis as distinctly valid, modern subjects for poetry. Gunn's telling lines in the poem "Elvis Presley" could also be read as a credo for his own evolving poetics:

"He turns revolt into a style, prolongs/The impulse to a habit of the time."

Turning revolt into a style was to prove Gunn's directive. While the allegorical poems from his first two books still draw on unsurprising themes and employ myth and religion rather conventionally to explore their subjects, a liberating undertow of defiance is everywhere present. In "High Fidelity", a poem about listening to records, Gunn's metaphysical playfulness works to impose reason on an emerging pop culture:

"I play your furies back to me at night,/ The needle dances in the grooves they made,/ For fury is passion like love, and fury's bite/ These grooves, no sooner than a love mark fades..."

By the time Gunn published Moly in 1971, he was deeply involved in the west coast rock scene of outdoor festivals and psychedelic happenings, and his work took on a spacey, almost visionary quality. Poems like "Tom-Dobin," "The Colour Machine," "Street Song," "The Fair In The Woods," "The Messenger," and "At the Centre" are all examples of a poetry siding with altered states. Gunn writes about his LSD experiences with remarkable clarity:

"...Later, downstairs and at the kitchen table,/I look round at my friends. Through light we move/Like foam. We started choosing long ago/--clearly and capably as we were able--/Hostages from the pouring we are of. /The faces are as bright now as fresh snow." ----(From "At the Centre")

Gunn's first five collections, represented in the first half of Collected Poems, gave little indication of his coming out as a gay man. The acid landscape of Moly, however, seems to have provided a space of psychological transition necessary for the poet to write more explicitly about his sexuality. Since Jack Straw's Castle (1976), his work has been explicitly informed by the details of his engagement with the gay subculture and its interactions with the culture at large. It is also more explicit about his interior emotional landscape.

Ten years lapsed between Gunn's publication of The Passages of Joy (1982) and The Man With Night Sweats (1992). This interval is in part attributable to the adjustment, personal and poetic, to watching a generation liquidated by AIDS. The plague and its increasing casualties have proved a central subject for Gunn's later poetry, and by the final phase of the Collected Poems he has taken on the role of principal elegist to a virally stricken gay community. The poem "Elegy" first provided Gunn the stripped-down manner and elegiac tone which he needed for his task, and which he has subsequently made inimitably his own. Here, a sense of the unwavering terror at the heart of suicide is powerfully evoked:

"Though I hardly knew him /I rehearse it again and again/ Did he smell eucalyptus last?/No it was his own blood/as he choked on it"

In Thom Gunn's incarnation as a compassionate, deeply humane elegist to dying friends, his touch is neither too grave nor too light. Steeped in 17th century poetry-a period rich in the elegist's art-he proved himself as adept at writing formal couplets in the celebration of the dying or the dead as he had at writing free verse. "The Missing" is a particularly successful late poem in Gunn's canon. In it, he perceives himself as belonging to a universal gay family, a resilient but continuously reduced nucleus in which survival is all.

"Now as I watch the progress of the plague,/ The friends surrounding me fall sick, grow thin, /And drop away. Bared, is my shape less vague/Sharply exposed and with a sculpted skin?// I do not like the statue's chill contour,/ Not nowadays. The warmth investing me /led outward through mind, limb feeling and more/ In an involved increasing family. // Contact of a friend led to another friend, /Supple entwinement through the living mass /Which for all that I knew might have no end, /Image of an unlimited embrace."

Nobody has or will put this better. Gunn's achievements over four decades of writing are those of an innovator pushing the boundaries of the accepted subject matter of poetry. He is a master of the compressed lyric executed in formal stanzas, yet he is always modern. And he is compellingly truthful.

An outsider to British poetry by reason of place and sensibility, Gunn is, to me, the most exciting poet of his generation. The Collected Poems is the place to get at the whole body of work of a poet who continues to surprise, who celebrates those who live on the cutting edge of social and sexual issues in our crazily up-ended, but always meaningful world.

I am delighted that this kind of serious discussion about poetry takes place on Amazon!

In my opinion, Gunn (who is probably my favorite living poet) is what I would call a major minor English poet. This, of course, means his work IS limited compared with more broad and singularly important figures such as Keats and Auden. (I think Larkin, whom I admire, is a bad comparison--he's quite limited himself, especially in his prejudices against foreign (read: non-British) poets, etc.) I think modesty of a kind and slightness are a part of Gunn's intentional aims as a writer. He stubbornly--and graciously--refuses to overdo it. And many of his readers, myself included, remain grateful for such decency and tough-mindedness. It's a rare gift. On the other hand, he really surpasses himself at times, and rises to supreme heights, such as in his poem "To Cupid", which appears in his most recent collection Boss Cupid. That makes him a distant nephew of Baudelaire. I don't think I've seen anything quite like "Moly" before either. And there are countless other fine examples of his artistry.

One fault of Gunn's early poetry is that he isn't especially funny! He seems to be making up for that though, at a later date. Also, he may have seemed too cold and technical in the beginning, like a scalpel, at times--a mistake that's happily been mostly washed away by the passing years. (The wonderful poet Mina Loy, who is a favorite of Gunn's--he may write about her work better than anybody else--curiously also displays these same dislikable characteristics in a number of poems. And she doesn't transcend her own propriety nearly enough, unlike Gunn.)

Gunn seems to use illegal drugs not just for the thrill effect, but also as a kind of dynamite, to blast open his creative resources. So he seems to be very aware of the problem. I can only applaud him for that. And his transplanting himself in America, San Francisco no less, was such a gutsy move, it may well have saved his career, or perhaps even his life! Look what our country contributed to these Collected Poems. That's something to feel proud of. He is a son of Whitman and Duncan as well as Shakespeare.

Futhermore it may be figures like Gunn who stay with us more than many of the big guns. Just as Elizabeth Bishop has come to be viewed as more admirable and enjoyable, in certain respects, than Robert Lowell, I wouldn't be surprised if Gunn gains a bit of an edge over the truly majestic Ted Hughes in the future.

Whilst finding the review above helpful, interesting and informed, I would like to add a few comments:

1) Gunn's early work is often technically smug and so playful that it verges on the trite. (see Carnal Knowledge and others from A Sense of Movement).

2) Gunn is generally successful, but in limited aims. Consequently contemporaries like Larkin are consistently more powerful. It is unfair to judge it by a greatness it doesn't pretend to.

3) The surprise expressed at the conventional form is telling. Gunn does not tend to use the mechanics of poetry to their most powerful effect. The subtlety of sentiment he shows in poems such as Autumn Chapter in a Novel is not everywhere present. Whilst he gains a greater freedom with his cultural and pharmaceutical roamings, he needs greater discipline to achieve either classical or romantic virtues. It is hard to tell which he aspires to.

4) Gunn's most recent book, Boss Cupid, is, after a promising start, generally loose, self-indulgent and weary. He appears to be past his best...

Generally, I'd say that Gunn is an important and good poet, but would caution against eulogising him...!

Thom Gunn's "Night Sweats" is one of his finest books of poetry. He is a master at writing lines that are so rhythmatic and flowing. These poems deal with AIDS and also drug use. They are not easy to read, and very sad at times. But they deal with problems and subjects most of us have had to face in the last 20 years, whether we liked it or not. There is true feeling and honesty here. I especially enjoyed "In the Time of Plague" and "Memory Unsettled."

I recommend this book as part of your permanent collection to be read again and again. Thom Gunn's poetry is the best.

Thom Gunn is a masterful poet, and this is a book full of beauty and pain. Many of the poems deal directly with AIDS, many (such as the title work) with heroin use. And yet they are not preachy, or sentimental. He is in firm control of difficult subject matter.

Also pleasing is his use of rhythm and meter -- Gunn is one of apparently few modern poets who still writes powerfully within a given meter and rhyme scheme.

Not light or easy reading, these poems are sad and sobering. Tears are advised but not required.

i know gunn is a good poet, i've read many poems he has written that i like. but this collection is weaker than gunn's usual work. the book does get stronger as it goes on, making section three the strongest of the three sections.

I think this new book shows Thom Gunn at his greatest as a poet. Many people who became fans of Gunn's work (very understandably)because of his last collection of poems, The Man with Night Sweats, probably won't be quite sure what to do with this material. But it's very characteristic of him, really! Both in style and in subject matter. Experimental yet classical, freewheeling but sane--the book's entire premise is the triumph of love in all matter of circumstances. And those readers who positively reviewed Gunn's Collected Poems, will recognize that the master has taken all of his knowledge of poetic forms (quite considerable) and his life experience (ditto) ahead, in a way that makes his true fans want to follow his every move; it's a virtuosic performance. "To Cupid" ("You make desire seems easy./ So it is:/ Your service perfect freedom to enjoy/ Fresh limitations.") isn't just one of the best poems Gunn has ever written, it's one of the best poems ANYBODY has ever written. It incorporates the motif of The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal, who is certainly one of Gunn's most obvious literary fathers. As is Baudelaire: whose richness of romantic diction and sentiment is echoed in the poem, and others. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gunn may be be reprimanded in some quarters for not becoming a clever and ironic realist. But that's not what we want from either one of them; they're more likable, and perhaps wiser, than that. With "Duncan"--a poem dedicated to his late friend, the excellent American poet Robert Duncan, Gunn proves once again both his own need for truthfulness, and his appreciation of the habits and affections of others. (H.D., a poet Gunn formerly trashed--I think, unfairly--in an essay on women poets makes a startling guest appearance in the poem.) "A Home" is one of the most heartbreaking poems Gunn has ever written; it's marvellous. ("Raised, he said, not at home but in a Home...Between the boys/ Contact, not loose, not free, consisting mainly/ In the wrestling down of slave by slave. Call this/ The economy of bruises: threats of worse/ Pin you in place, for more convenient handling./ And nothing occurs casually but dirt.") The "Troubadour" cycle, which is subtitled "songs for Jeffrey Dahmer," is bound to turn many heads, or even disgust listeners. But I think the poems are well done (especially the first and second to last) and Gunn is trying to be honest here too: to admit what happens when one's desire becomes too strong, and you cannot let go of the beloved--in tragic and comic proportions. Also highly noteworthy are the connected poems "In The Post Office" and "Postscript: The Panel" which are, I believe, about the same Charlie Hinkle who is honored, as a victim of AIDS and as a poet, in Gunn's famous last volume. I like these two poems even better than the really exceptional former work. I feel the subject is brought more to life; we can almost see and touch him as the remarkable person he must have been. And that was his dying request, if I understand it right. I won't ever forget the lines: "I hadn't felt it roused, to tell the truth,/ In several years, that old man's greed for youth,/ Like Pelias's that boiled him to a soup,/ Not since I'd had the sense to cover up/ My own particular seething can of worms,/ And settle for a friendship on your terms." Or, "If only I could do whatever he did,/ With him or as a part of him, if I/ Could creep into his armpit like a fly,/ Or like a crab cling to his golden crotch,/ Instead of having to stand back and watch." And especially: "I thought that we had shared you more or less,/ As if we shared what no one might possess,/ Since in a net we sought to hold the wind." I haven't yet mentioned Gunn's religious poetry--which was a surprise to me! A pleasant one. Since he brings all of his intelligence and passionate feeling to bear on that subject as well. And it turns out to be not very far away from the rest of the book, what he's telling us, in the "Dancing David" poems, most of all. I also love "Arethusa Raped" (after Shelley), "Famous Friends" and "The little cousin dashed in" and "Save the word"--all featured in the wonderful middle section of the collection, entitled GOSSIP. "In Trust" and "A Wood near Athens" are absolutely superb. Will Boss Cupid receive as much praise and notoriety as Ted Hughes' last collection Birthday Letters and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf? Well, it should. Gunn has done truly exceptional and lasting work, and he deserves the credit for it. I think he's the greatest living poet in the world and he's never been better than this. That's something to feel grateful for, at least.

Thom Gunn's poetry is marvelously crafted and filled with intriguing imagery. His series of poems about Jeffrey Dahmer is rather thought-provoking. For me, his poetry doesn't have an emotional impact, but rather a mental one. I prefer fiery poems, that rattle my brain and shake my worldview. Gunn achieves that in some poems, but not all in this collection. I can see why he's highly acclaimed, though. It's just not my taste.

I consider myself completely unqualified to "review" poetry, but I must say I find Gunn's work wholly satisfying and moving. I read poetry rarely -- dabbling self-indulgently in a bit of Anne Sexton when I'm feeling blue and morbid -- but I purchased "The Man With the Nightsweats" on it's paperback release and have kept it near to hand since. When "Boss Cupid" was published, a friend presented me with the book and I devoured it. It's been nearly two months now, and not a day has gone by that I haven't revisited the book, either by physically reading or musing on its charms. Long live Thom Gunn.

I'm not a poet, I just enjoy and love reading poetry. Thiswas my first time reading Thom Gunn's poetry, and I was reallyimpressed by his new book of poetry, "Boss Cupid." This is also the first book of poetry I have read right through to the end in one setting, and then re-read most of them again. That's how much I enjoyed Mr. Gunn's poems.

The book is divided into 3 sections of different subject matter. I enjoyed the second section, "Gossip" the most. There are a lot of poems about nights in bars, poems about bartenders, lovers, and other gay friends, and experiences. The poem, "Letters from Manhattan" is an interesting poem about his friend and that friends sexual affairs with young men in outdoor settings in Manhattan. In "American Boy" he talks about hating older men who bothered him when he was young, but now that his is old himself, he's attracted to younger men, and their love sustains him and gives him enlightenment in his old age. And then there are many other poems covering a wide range of subjects from King David to Jeffrey Dahmer.

If you enjoy poetry that's intelligent, easy to read and understand, and full of gay experiences you can relate to, and other life experiences, you will truly enjoy this book. Now that I am a fan of Thom Gunn, I can't wait to read his "Collected Poems" (1994) edition. This book is highly recommended. END

Thom Gunn is a wonderful poet and an incisive, elegant prose stylist. This collection of essays from the past 30 years or so is a fine overview of Gunn's chief interests and ideas. Three essays stand out. First, the essay on the poetry of Thomas Hardy is a brilliant discussion of that poet and novelist's melancholy, aching verse. I learned about several important poems that I had read before but that hadn't drawn my deep attention. Gunn's exegesis of those poems is stunningly erudite and useful. Second, Gunn's presentation on the poetry of Fulke Greville is insightful and deeply inspiring. The work of this fine 16th-century poet deserves to be better known. Yvor Winters tried his best to get Greville regarded as one of the greats, but Gunn has taken that work to the next level by lending his unquestionable credibility to an effort to get people to read the religious, philosophical poetry of Greville, who was chums with Sir Philip Sydney. Third, and best, is the deeply stirring memorial essay on Yvor Winters, the controversial critic who stormed around the American literary scene, mostly and sadly without much effect, in the first half of the last century. Gunn studied with Yvor at Stanford in the late 50s, and his depiction of the great and somewhat eccentric (perhaps "exceedingly intense" is a better phrase) poet and critic is first-rate, even if you don't a thing about Winters. There are a number of other distinguished essays in this book, and every piece offers at least some excellment commentary on a variety of writers, many of them modern favorites. Gunn has been a formalist poet most of his career, and one of the best in my judgment, though he has worked well in free verse, too. His understanding of poetry, from the viewpoint of one of the finest formalists of our time, is badly needed in this chaotic literary age. You will learn a great deal about poetry and formal poetry reading Gunn. Some people have been scared off from Gunn because he is an open (and almost nonchalantly open) homosexual who has written about the gay experience in his poetry, but don't permit the idea that Gunn is only a "gay" poet keep you from some of the best criticism written during the last 30 years. I am not gay, and I have learned a great deal about poetry and even religious poetry from Thom Gunn. We need a lot more critics like him, gay and straight. Give him a try, and don't pass up his poetry either.