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“... subjects/performers, but the influences will often be far from straightforward. Geoffrey Hill and Thom Gunn impress by their quiet responsiveness, their unembarrassed exploration of their own complexities – but equally they are given by Haffenden the benefit of long interviews and of questioning which follows up both intellectual contexts and precise ...”

“... variety of places (Alaska, Montreal, Portugal) but in 1981 settled in San Francisco, where he met Thom Gunn, to whom his most recent book, Green Sees Things in Waves (1998), is dedicated. Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club is divided into two sections, ‘East’ and ‘West’, though a number of poems also cross-cut from coast to coast. The air outside ...”

“... who belonged and who didn’t, and so on. Many commentators have been tempted to concur with Thom Gunn’s later weariness: ‘The whole business looks now like a lot of categorising foolishness.’ Yet it is a label that has stuck, at once serviceable and misleading, much as we still speak of ‘the Metaphysicals’ or ‘the Georgians’ before ...”

“... new scheme for giving some money to good poets, not necessarily young ones. As it turned out, Thom Gunn, once associated with Larkin in the ‘Movement’, was the chief beneficiary. But what struck me most about the numerous entries, all of which had been published in magazines or in booklet form, was that they were poems with the right ...”

“... life/Abides ’midst burghers some heavy business’). Elizabeth Bishop is a delight to read; Thom Gunn contributes a charming piece on surfriding; and Marianne Moore, considering the sea as a grave, has a linethe birds swim through the air top speed,            uttering catcalls as hereforethat completely deflates A.R. Wetjen, who comes ...”

“... wrote just out of adolescence, forty years ago, in the manner of the late Movement and especially Thom Gunn, are his starchiest. His poems are full of haircuts and suits, but he is probably the least materialist of poets; or, conversely put, his poems aspire to the lift-off of prayer, and yet they are regularly menaced by prosiness and anecdote. Reading ...”

“... Clarke, and pursued implicitly in a number of other essays (particularly on Bunting, Sisson and Gunn) in favour of a poetry that is itself intrusive, disruptive, open to the contingent, willing to state a position and make a case. What Davie admires most is a poetry whose discourse and rhetoric are continuous with discourses and rhetorics beyond the ...”

“... and partly compensating for them. Today these skills are derided even as they disappear. Thom Gunn once wrote a poem celebrating them called ‘All do not all things well’ – it’s not mentioned in Autopia – which describes two ‘auto freaks’ from the American underclass who dismantle cars on driveways. Neighbours who disapprove of the ...”

“... Elvis – but to the men who write about the men, such as Auden (‘The Fall of Icarus’), Thom Gunn (the two ‘Elvis’ poems) or Eliot (‘Tiresias’). Duffy’s Mrs Lazarus, an altogether gentler creature than Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, muses on her husband’s death and her all too brief new life: The last hair on his head floated out ...”

“... to the towers of Manhattan. He’d sigh audibly each time. He missed his old love, Ann. Even Thom Gunn was enchanted by her. Thom was very rarely, if ever, enchanted by women, and certainly wasn’t enchanted by Christopher. (Nor Christopher by him, and they could not have been more disapproving of each other’s ...”

“... who followed his advice for some part of their careers is impressive. It includes J.V. Cunningham, Thom Gunn, Donald Davie and Robert Pinsky, all of whom have paid tribute to his teaching. Many of them went further in the direction of Modernism than Winters would have liked. Davie, for example, spent much of his life championing Pound, yet nearly all his ...”

“... height of corruption). I had a party to mark the new room; no one found it heartless, I think. Thom Gunn has a poem in The Man with Night Sweats in which he imagines the dead watching the living on TV, until, after a few episodes, they get bored and feel excluded and begin, at last, ‘weaned from memory’, to join the snowy battalions of the truly ...”

“... jacket. He took Deborah to hear David Bowie and Lou Reed, and read her Oscar Wilde, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. He showed her a ring binder containing sections labelled ‘Lyrics’ and ‘Novel’. ‘I felt privileged that he had trusted me enough to let me see the extent of his ambitions,’ she writes in her introduction. Curtis had no doubt about his ...”

“... inquiry. One organising principle has the authors contrasting two poets per chapter (Byron and Thom Gunn are conjoined, simply by virtue of being poets who shook the dust of England from their shoes) but then the chapters get baggier (the one on Auden cuts to Heaney’s death and back, moves on to an anecdote about Coleridge, and stutters out with ...”

“... review of Helen Vendler’s Harward Book of Contemporary Poetry in the Threepenny Review in 1986, Thom Gunn declared himself utterly unimpressed with what he described as an ‘obviously worthless book’, but went on to compare and favourably contrast Kleinzahler’s first full-length collection Storm over Hackensack (1985) as ‘something ...”