Finished Thom Gunn's Collected Poems yesterday. It concludes with his extraordinarily moving elegies on various of his friends and acquaintances who were victims of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, from his 1992 collection The Man with the Night Sweats, and if those brilliant poems don't put him in the top rank of poets from the second half of the twentieth century I don't know what would. Actually I'd already been classifying him as such from rereading Jack Straw's Castle onwards, a book I got hold of when it was first published as a review copy for a magazine (which I didn't pay for, but ironically never reviewed) and which sort of haunted me through its dizzying mixture of dinner jacket formal discipline and take-your-shirt-off looseness.
The Collected doesn't include his final book, Boss Cupid, which I don't know at all, but which I'm looking forward to getting hold of as soon as I allow myself a book-based buying spree. I now find myself a bit of a fanboy Gunn-wise, and very happy to be so.
Now it remains to decide whose chunky Collected residing on my shelves I intend to tackle next. I reckon it's likely to be Sylvia Plath's, partly based on the fact that I haven't read a woman's Collected cover to cover, which is a bit embarrassing, but mainly because she's brilliant and I'm in the mood to have the top of my head taken off yet again, following TG's ministrations in that direction.
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