Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Gunn, Thom (1929-2004)
Titre(s) : Selected poems [Texte imprimé] / Thom Gunn ; edited by Clive Wilmer
Publication : London : Faber & Faber, 2017
Description matérielle : 1 vol. (XLV-284 p.) ; 23 cm
Note(s) : Thom Gunn has been described as 'one of the most singular and compelling poets in
English during the past half-century' (TLS). This Selected Poems, compiled by his
friend Clive Wilmer and accompanied by insightful notes, is the first edition to represent
the full arc of Gunn's inimitable career. 'The poetry of Thom Gunn was much admired
in his lifetime, and at the same time often misunderstood and underestimated. The
scale of his achievement, and its uniqueness - a masterful Elizabethan lyric poet
writing in the second half of the twentieth century - is just now becoming properly
appreciated. Anonymous in voice, even in the service of the most intimate subject
matter, acute in observation, particularly the urban experience, with San Francisco
the principal site, Gunn is not merely the poet of the druggy '60s in California or
the plague of the AIDS epidemic, but of the deeper-running themes, shared by Shakespeare,
Baudelaire, William Carlos Williams and all his greatest exemplars, of the artist's
moral and imaginative engagement with the world as it actually is, in the broadest
possible sense, not as contemporary fashion might have it be. Which strikes me, who
knew and loved the man and poet, as a kind of heroism.' August Kleinzahler'Thom Gunn
smuggled the lyric tradition out of post-war Britain, and gave it cool, gracious renaissance
in California. His poetry evokes the wild life of the body with madrigal-like elegance.'
Fiona Sampson'Gunn's work illustrates with unusual clarity some of the debates poetry
in English has pursued in [the twentieth] century - form versus improvisation, diction
versus talk, the American way versus the English tradition, even, at times, authenticity
versus art. To contain these contradictory impulses and . . . to have generated a
body of work which anybody wanting to understand the period and identify some of its
best poems will find essential reading - this is quite an achievement.' Sean O'Brien
Autre(s) auteur(s) : Wilmer, Clive (1945-....). Éditeur scientifique
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780571327690. - ISBN 0571327699 (rel.)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb454167682
Notice n° :
FRBNF45416768
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)