Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview By Thorn Gunn (Faber, £7.99 in UK)

Thom Gunn, though originally one of the newly-emerged English poets of the 1950s, has lived in California for over 40 years and…

Thom Gunn, though originally one of the newly-emerged English poets of the 1950s, has lived in California for over 40 years and appears to be virtually naturalised as a West Coast writer. His dual, or at least mixed, identity as an "Anglo-American poet" is discussed at the end of this volume in an interview with Jim Powell. The essays discuss the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, among others, and there is a lively memoir of Christopher Isherwood, another English writer naturalised in California.

Gunn elsewhere espouses the now academically fashionable work of Basil Bunting, and also that of Janet Lewis (unknown to me).