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Amazon.com's Price: $20.00 Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 821
EAN: 9780374524333
ISBN: 0374524335
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: April 30, 1995
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 679943
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
One of the best-known and best-loved poets of the English-speaking world, Larkin (1922-85) had only a small number of poems published during his lifetime. Collected Poems, which J. D. McClatchy called 'a fascinating and indispensable text' in The New York Times Book Review, brings together not only all of Larkin's published verse--The North Ship (1945), the pamphlet of XX Poems (1953), The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974)--but also a vast selection of his uncollected poetry.
Amazon.com Review:
Thom Gunn has always known how to refresh his sight. His Collected Poems offers startling and capacious poems that haven't appeared before in book form--poems that make a case that there is no such thing as a typical Thom Gunn poem, such as 'At the Barriers' and 'Confessions of a Life Artist': People will forget Shakespeare.
He will lie with George Formby
and me, here where the swine root.
Later, the solar system
will flare up and fall into
space, irretrievably lost.
For the loss, as for the life,
there will be no excuse, there
is no justification.
Gunn's work stands distinct from many of his contemporaries in that he has used form in the service of lyrical, not pathological, intensity (see 'Expression'). Always the tragedian, never the tragic figure, he knows that vision requires vigilance. His patient watchfulness has allowed him to assemble a body of lyric poems that compose a condensed social history of the times. He has never backed away from the tough philosophical position put forth in his great early poem 'The Annihilation of Nothing': 'It is despair that nothing cannot be.... Neither firm nor free, / Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.'
Gunn's poems untwist the conundrum of knowing and transform it into wisdom--that which is beyond the self, beyond the mediating circumstance. His is poetry that you can turn to in the dead of night for hard words that do not exclude.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - a truly astounding poet
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 ... Read More
Rating: - BOTH of the previous reviews are helpful and accurate...
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 ... Read More
Rating:  - Comments to add to Jeremy Reed's review...
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 ... Read More
Rating: - The Evolution of a Great Poet
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 ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 821
EAN: 9780374524333
ISBN: 0374524335
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: April 30, 1995
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Sales Rank: 679943
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux