Top 6- Thom Gunn

You must be joking. Did you really think it was going to take me as long as this before I picked Thom Gunn's best 6 poems. Thom is picutured here in a tie-dye vest that didn't make into his top ten of them.

One day I might have to do Milton and there is every chance that Paradise Lost won't be in it but for the time being, it's easy. Without his example, I don't know if I would have tried quite so hard to make myself into any kind of poet in the first place so, yes, it is mainly his fault. Three early objects of sublime wonderment select themselves and they are Tamer and Hawk, My Sad Captains and Touch. Even I, the ardentest of admirers, might have begun to think that The Man with Night Sweats, however widely acclaimed it was as a return to form, didn't include anything quite so good. But it was never true that Gunn's career was patchy. There were plenty of good poems in every book. And there were several beautiful things in Boss Cupid, the last collection before he died, in among the anecdotal poems. The Butcher's Son is such an understated piece of genius that you have to check again if he really did do such a thing in such monosyllabic, simple language.

I can't afford any more choices from that last book but, quite honestly, I can't be sure, so I'm going for Rastignac at 45, which a lot of people wouldn't, and then I am going back to the last book for The Gas Poker.

It wasn't quite as easy I thought but sometimes one can know a bit too much.