There is a particular kind of sadness that comes with discovering a writer who is already dead. I never met Thom Gunn. The Anglo-American died in 2004, and it wasn’t until 2005 or 2006 that I discovered his Collected Poems and his final volume, Boss Cupid.
Such a moment feels like buying a huge, rambling house only to discover that you actually own just the room you’re standing in. Every so often, there will be a new discovery, perhaps an unseen poem that a scholar digs up from beneath the floorboards, but this is the sum total of it – there will never be anything new again.
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