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  • New Selected Poems of Thom Gunn and Selected Poems of Thom Gunn ed. by Clive Wilmer and August Kleinzahler
  • Belle Randall (bio)
New Selected Poems of Thom Gunn, ed. Clive Wilmer ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 336 pp.
Selected Poems of Thom Gunn, ed. August Kleinzahler ( London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 128 pp.

As the title of the American edition, New Selected Poems of Thom Gunn, makes plain, this is not the only "Selected" of Gunn to have been published since his death in 2004. Nor can it replace its immediate predecessor, edited by August Kleinzahler, an excellent little paperback, still widely available, slim and flexible enough to fit in a back pocket. The new Selected is a hardcover roughly three times the length of the old. The former contains about eighty pages of poetry, the latter, more than twice as much poetry, together with eighty pages of notes based mainly on biographical information—letters, journals, and other sources—not previously available.

Like the editor of the old Selected, the editor of the new, Clive Wilmer, was a close personal friend of the poet, a man with whom Gunn shared many informal conversations about poetry and poetics, which gives his selections and commentary an easygoing authority. Although "Movement" poets—as British poets of the 1950s attempting to climb out from under the pervasive influence of the moderns were sometimes called—are usually defined in opposition to T. S. Eliot, Eliot's insistence that art is "impersonal" and an "escape from personality" finds contemporary embodiment is Gunn's work. At a time when poetry is often assumed to be a form of autobiography—a tale of hardships overcome told in the "authentic" first-person voice of the narrator—Gunn's poetry is a refreshing corrective.

The new Selected supplies information about Gunn's life story, of which readers previously have had little to go on, aside from a few pages of prose reminiscence ("My Life Up to Now," "The Cambridge Years"). It was not until late in his life that Gunn was able to broach in writing so personal a subject as his mother's death by suicide, an event that occurred a few days after Christmas, the year he was fifteen. The poem that results, "The Gas Poker," depicts the discovery of her body by Thom and his younger brother Ander. As so often in Gunn's writing, the accurate detail becomes a metaphor. In the position in which they find her, "the poker" resembles a flute, and its music, the poem says, fills her up and renders her mute. What about her son? Did his grief became the wellspring of poetry? In recent years, when the word disinterested has taken on its previously secondary meaning of uninterested, and the very idea of "truth" has been held up to convenient political scorn, Gunn's "disinterested/hard energy" ("My Sad Captains") reminds us of the lodestar poetry can be.

Wilmer quotes from Gunn's previously unpublished teenage diary, whose [End Page 168] first entry records the facts of his mother's death, facts so raw, images so disturbing that this endnote seems almost to overshadow the text. Readers need more information than is provided here to understand the context of Charlotte Gunn's act (why did Thom and Ander, pushing away the heavy chest of drawers with which she had blocked their entry to her room, already guess what they would find?). It will take a book-length biography to answer such questions. One hopes it is soon forthcoming.

Belle Randall

Belle Randall has been poetry editor of Common Knowledge since its inception. Her poem "A Child's Garden of Gods" is included in The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of "Poetry" Magazine, and her own books include 101 Different Ways of Playing Solitaire and Other Poems; The Orpheus Sedan; Drop Dead Beautiful; and The Coast Starlight. She is coeditor (with Richard Denner) of Exploding Flowers: Selected Poems of Luis Garcia.

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