Hornbake Celebrates Thom Gunn Book With New Exhibit

University of Maryland Libraries Special Collections celebrates the publication of At the Barriers with a new digital exhibit, "'Well, I wanted a new vision...': Thom Gunn and 'Misanthropos.'"

Editor Joshua Weiner has brought together leading poets and scholars for an assessment of Thom Gunn in At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn (Chicago, 2009). Weiner, Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, draws new critical attention to Gunn's place in Anglo-American letters with significant attention to Gunn's literary and personal involvement in the "social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture."

With Gunn's "life as it was and his works as they are, he's an obvious candidate for a volume of retrospective and critical essays, and this one is first rate," says Stephen Burt.

Consisting of sixteen essays from a range of literary icons from the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, At the Barriers has an international flair appropriate for an assessment of Thom Gunn's life and work and his broad influence. Together, the essays trace "how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic."

Coinciding with the publication of At the Barriers, the University of Maryland Libraries' Special Collections has debuted a digital exhibit, "'Well, I wanted a new vision...': Thom Gunn and 'Misanthropos.'" This new exhibit provides an illuminating extension of Weiner's own essays in At the Barriers by highlighting key points from the unique research materials available at the University of Maryland Libraries. The University acquired the papers of Thom Gunn between 1983 and 1995.

Read more about At the Barriers here.