The Letters of Thom Gunn

"He did the best he could with what life gave him, and I love him for it."

"It is amazing how much better some are when fresh'); his poetic craft and workshopping of pieces; and the experience of being a gay man in the second half of the 20th century as he navigates sexual adventures and the AIDS epidemic...The editors' footnotes are illustrative rather than intrusive, and the robust collection is packed with life and vigor...This should help bring Gunn and his work to a new generation of readers."

"Rather than succumb to dreaded self-pity or combust in self-aggrandizement, he opts for the more treacherous middle road of self-inquiry."

"A criticism that's sometimes made of Gunn's work is that it lacks a central personality — or exhibits only the 'donned impersonality' that he observed (in his great poem 'On the Move') in the members of motorcycle gangs."

"Gunn's letters are a testament to his vitality and enthusiasm for a cornucopia of experiences embraced with gusto and eloquently shared."

"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."

"Meticulously edited, introduced, and annotated by literary scholar Nott and poets Kleinzahler and Wilmer...In a comprehensive biographical overview, Nott observes that 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,' but a tender friend and an artist of 'literary and humane intelligence'...In letters to fellow poets, Gunn reflects on his writing process, the publication and reception of his work, his assessments of other poets, and, not least, his enthusiastic identity as a gay man, which he needed to conceal in his early poems...A detailed chronology, glossary of names, and photographs round out the volume, which is sure to please any fan of literary biography...A work of impressive scholarship."

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

"Quite rightly, the focus of this well-presented and helpfully annotated selection of his correspondence – merely a tenth of all the letters which the assiduous editors have turned up – is what the introduction calls 'literary interest'...Gunn seems to have been one of those rare good writers who is almost completely self-conscious about his own processes and predicaments, and it is perhaps suggestive that many of the most illuminating passages of self-reflection here are written to people who taught literature at universities (Tony Tanner, Donald Davie, Clive Wilmer, Douglas Chambers)...At the same time, his literary evaluations could be robustly non-professional: Richard Murphy is 'an egotistical prick'; 'if there hadn't been a Seamus Heaney, the critics would have had to invent one'; 'the new Formalists are talentless slime', and the like...Gunn comes across as performative, boisterous, amused, repeatedly anxious not to be a bore or to appear pompous, and delighted by his own candour...His love affair with San Francisco, especially its sex and drugs, comes through loud and clear; and, in contrast, the horror of the AIDS plague is vividly depicted, with Pepys-like perceptiveness, too...Gunn once told an interviewer that he led 'a very mundane, ordinary life'...I suppose the truth of that depends what you mean by "ordinary"...'It's very good living in San Francisco', he wrote to Christopher Isherwood, 'though I do occasionally feel a bit like Lord Rochester'...'I am the W of Babylon herself,' he cheerfully admitted to another friend...He certainly threw himself into things: 'I had a 36 hour sexual epiphany with a certain John Ambrosio' is not the sort of remark you find in the correspondence of every man of letters approaching seventy."

"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'."