The Poetry of Thom Gunn: A Critical Study, trans. by Jill Franks, with a Foreword by Clive Wilmer. [Si tratta della versione ampliata, rivista e tradotta in inglese del volume precedentemente pubblicato: Stefania Michelucci, La maschera, il corpo e l’anima. Saggio sulla poesia di Thom Gunn, con una prefazione di Clive Wilmer, Unicopli, Milano 2006, pp. 318].

Starting from theoretical premises drawn from philosophy, anthropology and sociology and adopting a method similar to the close reading of the Anglo-American tradition, the author examines the entire poetic opus of Thom Gunn. In his early poetry we find the desire for liberation from the angst-ridden prison of the intellect, from the masks that the individual feels compelled to wear even in the intimacy of sexual relationships. In later poems written in the United States we see a gradual opening to human relationships and to Nature, which is also a reclamation and reevaluation on Gunn’s part of his own nature, of his long repressed and hidden homosexuality. From this reclamation emerges a growing vitality that informs the works of his maturity, in which he celebrates the liberating experience of LSD and the joy he felt in the gay community, but also gives moving expression to his compassion for friends struck by the tragedy of AIDS and registers with dry melancholy the decline brought by old age. Characterized by a rigorous intellectual honesty and a sincerity that give his voice an unmistakable timbre, his poetry also constitutes a unique artistic experience because of his efforts to mediate between opposites: old Europe and modern America, traditional metrics and free verse, and contemporary language and the lessons of great poets from the past, in particular the Metaphysicals.