Among modern British poets, [Thom Gunn]—like Donald Davie or Charles Tomlinson—helps to dramatize the encounter, neither churlish nor chauvinistic, between a talent England has educated and a career America has engaged. (pp. 391-92)

Gunn's texts, both surface and hidden, assign place several meanings. The first is the body itself, the flesh within which we dwell. That occupation often seems uneasy, the body a marred counter in games of identity. Gunn explicitly mourns his generation's discomfort with the physical self. In "Three," for example, the speaker is alone on a California beach. He watches a family: father, mother, little boy. The child is "rapt in endless play," but the adults "had to learn their nakedness." (p. 392)

The body is most often at ease as the agent of human will, the weapon of the existential subject. In such poems as "Lerici," "My Sad Captains," or the first of...