Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell

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The book contains an extended interview, a career sketch, and an updated version of Hagstrom and Bixby’s comprehensive 1979 bibliography. It also contains several pages of quotations from Gunn’s critics. Also included is Gunn’s recent poem, Clean Clothes: a Soldier’s Song. This volume gives us an informative, friendly 42 page Q&A between Gunn and critic, biographer, and TLS eminence James Campbell, conducted in January 1999, after Gunn had completed what’s his new book, Boss Cupid … As usual, Gunn comes across as admirable: reserved about his private life, thoughtful about his principles. He’s someone who’s quite devoted to nightlife, to sex of course, to fun, and yet he’s articulated a liveable moral stringency, and an entirely appealing way of connecting art to ethical choice … It’s dangerous to take anyone’s life as exemplary - that must be one of the differences between people and poems - but Gunn’s in some ways can seem so. Stephen Burt, ‘Nightlife and Morality’, Poetry Review, Summer, 2000