In the past, I have been persuaded by those like Colin Falck who have thought Thom Gunn's distinctive and great achievement was to have re-established creative connections with at least one aspect of Shakespeare, and with some of Shakespeare's great contemporaries, notably Marlowe and Donne. Gunn, I believe, liked this notion, and Clive Wilmer endorses it in his excellent and too brief Introduction to The Occasions of Poetry [see excerpt above]. It is disconcerting to have to acknowledge that in Gunn's very fine collection of poems [The Passages of Joy] this dimension of his writing is no longer evident. In none of these 37 poems, as I read them, is there any longer evidence that their author has been attending to the songs from Shakespeare's plays, to Donne's Songs and Sonnets, or Marlowe's translations and imitations of Ovid: they are 'contemporary' in an altogether less complicated and more obvious...