The Letters of Thom Gunn

"Gunn had been raised in Kent, England, where his parents were journalists...He arrived in America fresh from Cambridge, and his first book of poems, Fighting Terms, had been published to lively notice...When he got a look at San Francisco, he knew he'd found his place...Not only was it beautiful, in league with the 'best European cities,' he wrote to a friend, but it was 'incidentally the queerest city I've ever been in,' Gunn remained there for the rest of his life, living in the Haight and teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, eventually six months on and six off...That letter is among the hundreds collected in The Letters of Thom Gunn,' an appealing selection of his rowdy, funny, filthy, intensely literate letters...These details, in general, won't surprise anyone who kept up with Gunn's poetry, which was metrically sophisticated and dealt sometimes with earthy topics such as LSD, the Hell's Angels, sex and its itchy discontents, and gay culture writ large...This book, like Gunn's life, puts an unusual mix of pleasures on display...On the one hand, he had indestructible appetites for sex and drugs, together and separately...Typical sentences from this book are: 'I woke up the next day surrounded by naked bodies and uniquely hungover' and 'Remind me to tell you how I lost the hair on my ass'."

"he reveals himself, intentionally or not, by not constantly revealing himself ..."

"These letters vastly increase our understanding of his painstaking compositional processes, for many of them were written to elicit feedback on work in progress from a trusted band of first readers...Like O'Hara, Gunn disdained the literary establishment, but he cared deeply how friends, such as the literary scholars Tony Tanner and Douglas Chambers or his Cambridge friend the mercurial and fascinating Tony White, responded to his work...Reading his contributions to these epistolary exchanges, one is struck by his startling lack of hubris or defensiveness—his openness, even late in his career, to advice and criticism...Gunn's commitment to a rigorous use of form and meter and an obtrusively literary diction slowly dissolved as he acclimated to America's permissive poetic zeitgeist...This embrace of expanded poetic possibility matched Gunn's determination to open the doors of perception whenever opportunity presented: he tried LSD for the first time in June 1966, and despite initially suffering from 'incipient paranoias' soon developed into a fervent advocate of the druggy utopianism symbolized by the Summer of Love in 1967...A number of poems in his collection Moly (1971) are attempts to create poetic equivalents of the trip, as well as to do justice to the ideals of the counterculture as played out in the hippie heaven of San Francisco."

"'All this speed at my age will probably kill me soon,' he wrote in 2000, correctly."

"The suggestion of unfathomable pain lurking behind Gunn's 'donned impersonality' is, as Michael Nott writes in his shrewd introduction to this book, one of the most seductive qualities of his work."

"The correspondence throws new light on his work by allowing us to see things other than his notorious coolness."