Selected Poems of Thom Gunn

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.