Another Look at Thom Gunn

New Selected Poems by Thom Gunn, edited by Clive Wilmer. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, $30.00 cloth.

AS ITS title indicates, Clive Wilmer’s New Selected Poems by Thom Gunn is not the first or only volume of its kind. During his lifetime, Gunn himself made three selections of his work. The earliest, a joint volume with Ted Hughes, appeared from Faber and Faber in 1962, when Gunn and Hughes were in their early thirties and were the Young Turks on Faber’s poetry list. Updated and expanded selections of Gunn’s work alone were published in 1969 and in 1979. Then, in 2007, three years after Gunn’s death, Faber issued, in its Poet-to-Poet series, another selected Gunn, this one edited by August Kleinzahler, who is, with Wilmer, co-executor of Gunn’s literary estate. Comparing these four volumes to Apple’s successive iPhones, we can think of them as the STG (Selected Thom Gunn) 1, the STG 2, the STG 3, and the STG 4, and give high marks to the 1 and 4 models. The former draws engagingly from Gunn’s first three books and reminds us of the flash and energy with which he first burst onto the literary scene. The latter covers the full span of his fifty-year career and generously represents his two richest individual collections, Moly (1971) and The Man with Night Sweats (1992). However, like the award-winning iPhone 5 and its upgraded 5S and SE versions, Wilmer’s edition provides us with a new benchmark. It constitutes a leap forward from its predecessors and offers the most illuminating portrait we have yet had of one of the finest poets of the twentieth century.

Several features make the STG 5 especially nifty. First, it is handsomely readable, with attractive but unfussy type and a layout that gives the poems space to breathe on the page. Gone is the cramped printing that afflicted the STG 1, 2, and 4 and, to a lesser degree, the 3. In addition, Wilmer groups the poems he has chosen according to the individual collections in which they were originally published. A page that tells, which checks in at nearly 500 pages and which may daunt readers who are not already familiar with his work.