Eliot wrote of James that he was "difficult for English readers because he is an American; and … for Americans, because he is European…." Thom Gunn reverses the direction….

Some poets who suffer their reputations have positively constructed them. Gunn's willful exile or assumed estrangement takes up certain burdens in exchange for certain liberties. I have the sense that his situation—nationless, speechless, placeless, almost a name without an address—suits him exactly, and makes for him the kind of island Yeats was always imagining….

For Gunn's is a voice that wishes to fly any nets that would entrap it, nets of family or nation or doctrine; he has cherished silence, exile and cunning in an American city. If his exile is a vantage point, it is also a vision: life pared down to its nakedness….

This Selected Poems is a remarkable book, consistent in its bleak detachment, varied...