The Letters Of Thom Gunn

Author : Thom Gunn
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 525 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2022-05-24
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780374605704

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The Letters of Thom Gunn by Thom Gunn Pdf

The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. “I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

Author : Randall Mann
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 76 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2009-08-01
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780226503455

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Breakfast with Thom Gunn by Randall Mann Pdf

Aubade Those who lack a talent for love have come to walk the long Pier 7. Here at the end of the imagined world are three low-flying gulls like lies on the surface; the slow red of a pilot’s boat; the groan of a fisherman hacking a small shark— and our speech like the icy water, a poor translation that will not carry us across. What brought us west, anyway? A hunger. But ours is no Donner Party, we who feed only on scenery, the safest form of obfuscation: see how the bay is a gray deepening into gray, the color of heartbreak. Randall Mann’s Breakfast with Thom Gunn is a work both direct and unsettling. Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929–2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, the poems are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is “pitiless,” the trees “thin and bloodless,” the words “like the icy water” of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the “graceful erosion” of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in—and aroused by—a glittering, unforgiving subculture. Breakfast with Thom Gunnis at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal. Praise for Complaint in the Garden “We have before us a skillful, witty, passionate young poet. . . . Randall Mann is both attuned to and at odds with the natural world; he articulates the passions and predicaments of a self inside a massive, arousing, but sometimes brutal culture. And he accomplishes these things with buoyant lyric sensibilities and rejuvenating skills.”—Kenyon Review

Author : Joshua Weiner
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2009-08-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780226890371

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At the Barriers by Joshua Weiner Pdf

Maverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (1929–2004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn’s verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. The first book-length study of this major poet, At the Barriers surveys Gunn’s career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic. At the Barriers will solidify Gunn’s rightful place in the pantheon of Anglo-American letters.

Author : Thom Gunn
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 105 pages
File Size : 42,7 Mb
Release : 2010-12-09
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780571262564

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Boss Cupid by Thom Gunn Pdf

In some respects a sequel to The Man With Night Sweats, Boss Cupid is a memorialising of friends who have died, an anatomy of survival, and a self-portrait of the poet in age. The poems are written under the sign of Cupid, 'devious master of our bodies', but their intimacies are always heard against the sociable human hum of an entire community which Gunn depicts in poems of fluent grace, as formal as they are relaxed.

Author : Thom Gunn
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 86 pages
File Size : 52,6 Mb
Release : 2010-12-09
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780571262557

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The Man With Night Sweats by Thom Gunn Pdf

Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats shows him writing at the height of his powers, equally in command of classical forms and of looser, more colloquial measures, and ready to address a wide range of themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a set of poems about the deaths of friends from AIDS. With their unflinching directness, compassion and grace, they are among the most moving statements yet to have been provoked by the disease.

Author : Thom Gunn
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2017-07-04
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780571330065

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Selected Poems of Thom Gunn by Thom Gunn Pdf

Thom Gunn's controlled used of form and the metaphysical was in evidence from his first collection, Fighting Terms, in 1954, which was widely regarded - perhaps not entirely accurately - as a contributor to 'The Movement' and the opposition to modernism. The same technical ability and formal prowess endured after he moved from Cambridge to San Francisco, though became, from The Sense of Movement (1959) onwards, shot through with a new mood of hedonism, freedom and the excesses of the gay and counter-cultural scenes of 1960s America in poems written in celebration of rock and roll, myth, and hallucinogenic drugs. The '80s saw a shift in this life with the devastation of the Aids epidemic, which claimed the lives of a number of Gunn's friends. Many of these friends are memorialised in the moving, passionate and humane collections of his later years; the Forward Prize-winning The Man With the Night Sweats, and Boss Cupid, Gunn's last collection, published in 2000.This Selected Poems, compiled by his friend Clive Wilmer and accompanied by insightful notes, serves to honour a true original, a thrill-seeker in the language, and to exhibit the best of Thom Gunn's electric, powerful, intensely joyful poems.

Author : Thom Gunn
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 91 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 1973
Category : Electronic
ISBN : LCCN:72096312

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Moly, and My Sad Captains by Thom Gunn Pdf

Author : Ted Hughes
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 786 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2011-04-07
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780571262946

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Letters of Ted Hughes by Ted Hughes Pdf

At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art. This selection begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to others. It is a fascinatingly detailed picture of a mind of genius as it evolved through an incomparably eventful life and career.

Author : James Merrill
Publisher : Knopf
Page : 745 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2021-04-06
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781101875513

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A Whole World by James Merrill Pdf

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • The selected correspondence of the brilliant poet, one of the twentieth century's last great letter writers. "I don't keep a journal, not after the first week," James Merrill asserted in a letter while on a trip around the world. "Letters have got to bear all the burden." A vivacious correspondent, whether abroad, where avid curiosity and fond memory frequently took him, or at home, he wrote eagerly and often, to family and lifelong friends, American and Greek lovers, confidants in literature and art about everything that mattered—aesthetics, opera and painting, housekeeping and cooking, the comedy of social life, the mysteries of the Ouija board and the spirit world, and psychological and moral dilemmas—in funny, dashing, unrevised missives, composed to entertain himself as well as his recipients. On a personal nemesis: "the ambivalence I live with. It worries me less and less. It becomes the very stuff of my art"; on a lunch for Wallace Stevens given by Blanche Knopf: "It had been decided by one and all that nothing but small talk would be allowed"; on romance in his late fifties: "I must stop acting like an orphan gobbling cookies in fear of the plate's being taken away"; on great books: "they burn us like radium, with their decisiveness, their terrible understanding of what happens." Merrill's daily chronicle of love and loss is unfettered, self-critical, full of good gossip, and attuned to the wicked irony, the poignant detail—a natural extension of the great poet's voice.

Author : Jim Powell
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 1989-01-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0226677079

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It Was Fever That Made The World by Jim Powell Pdf

This sophisticated first collection by Jim Powell synthesizes personal and world history to produce a compelling vision of the past, through verse letters to friends and relatives, translations of Horace, Propertius, Sappho, and others, and allusions to ancient figures of history and mythology. "I find it difficult to overpraise the ease of this writing, which in one act combines succinct physical presentation and explanation of it. . . . It is perhaps here that Jim Powell, not yet forty, most shows his superiority to many of his contemporaries and seniors. He not only understands the way in which opposites are necessary to one another, he achieves his knowledge in the poem, and so we grasp it as we read. . . . he has tapped a subject matter that is endless and important, and by the thoroughgoingness and the subtlety of his exploration shows he has the power to do almost anything."—Thom Gunn, Shelf Life "His title burns away everywhere in the volume, in the fevers of eros, divination, memory, destruction, and grief. . . . Page for page, there is more sheer fine, clear, yet syntactically subtle and metaphorically gorgeous writing in Powell than I have seen in some time."—Mary Kinzie, Poetry "Jim Powell's poems, like those of Thomas Hardy, are haunted forms, full of ghosts and mocking gods, shadows and foreshadowings. But Powell is a Hardy whose poems we've never read, a Hardy with his hand in the blaze, not stirring the ash in a cold and wind-torn grate."—Jennifer Clarvoe, The Threepenny Review

Author : Thom Gunn
Publisher : Poet to Poet
Page : 114 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : UOM:39015069332701

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Thom Gunn by Thom Gunn Pdf

By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as provide a passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature.

Author : Thom Gunn
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2009-03-31
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0374258597

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Selected Poems by Thom Gunn Pdf

Thom Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there's nothing archaic, quaint, or sepia-toned about his poetry. His method was dispassionate and rigorous, uniquely well suited for making a poetic record of the tumultuous time in which he lived. Gunn's dozens of brilliantly realized poems about nature, friendship, literature, sexual love, and death are set against the ever-changing backdrop of San Francisco—the druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties. Perhaps no contemporary poet was better equipped—by temperament, circumstance, or poetic gift—to engage the subjects of eros and thanatos than Thom Gunn. This new Selected Poems, edited and with an introduction by the poet August Kleinzahler, supplants the 1979 Selected, presenting more of the later work and providing a fuller retrospective account of the breadth and magnitude of Gunn's extraordinary achievement.

Author : August Kleinzahler
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 113 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 2014-09-09
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781466880771

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The Strange Hours Travelers Keep by August Kleinzahler Pdf

Those aren't stars, darling That's your nervous system Nanna didn't take you to planetariums like this --from "Hyper-Berceuse: 3 A.M." August Kleinzahler's new poems stretch and go places he has never gone before: they have his signature high color and rhythmic jump, but they take on a breadth of voice and achieve registers that his earlier work only hinted at. Ranging from Vegas and Mayfair to the Asian steppes and contemporary Berlin, these poems touch down at will in tableaux where Liberace unceremoniously meets with St. Kevin and Attila with Zsa Zsa Gabor. Surprise after surprise, nothing seems to lie outside Kleinzahler's purview. This is the strongest collection to date from a poet with "the vision and confident skill to make American poetry new" (Clive Wilmer, The Times [London]).

Author : Simon Armitage
Publisher : Faber & Faber
Page : 156 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2011-12-12
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780571282074

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The Death of King Arthur by Simon Armitage Pdf

The Alliterative Morte Arthure - the title given to a four-thousand line poem written sometime around 1400 - was part of a medieval Arthurian revival which produced such masterpieces as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sir Thomas Malory's prose Morte D'Arthur. Like Gawain, the Alliterative Morte Arthure is a unique manuscript (held in the library of Lincoln Cathedral) by an anonymous author, and written in alliterating lines which harked back to Anglo-Saxon poetic composition. Unlike Gawain, whose plot hinges around one moment of jaw-dropping magic, The Death of King Arthur deals in the cut-and-thrust of warfare and politics: the ever-topical matter of Britain's relationship with continental Europe, and of its military interests overseas. Simon Armitage is already the master of this alliterative music, as his earlier version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006) so resourcefully and exuberantly showed. His new translation restores a neglected masterpiece of story-telling, by bringing vividly to life its entirely medieval mix of ruthlessness and restraint.

Author : Thom Gunn
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2019-12-03
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 0374538697

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New Selected Poems by Thom Gunn Pdf

A new selection of poems by the celebrated gay poet Thom Gunn has been described as “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Times Literary Supplement). Gunn was an Elizabethan poet in modern guise, though there’s nothing archaic, quaint, or sepia-toned about his poetry. His method was dispassionate and rigorous, uniquely well suited for making a poetic record of the tumultuous time in which he lived. Gunn’s dozens of brilliantly realized poems about nature, friendship, literature, sexual love, and death are set against the ever-changing backdrop of San Francisco—the druggy, politically charged sixties and the plague years of AIDS in the eighties. Perhaps no contemporary poet was better equipped—by temperament, circumstance, or poetic gift—to engage the subjects of eros and thanatos than Thom Gunn. This New 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.