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AMHERST, Mass.--Poet Daniel Hall, a visiting writer at Amherst College, will talk about "Form and Freedom: Thom Gunn in America" on Friday, April 27 at 4 p.m. in Porter Lounge in Converse Hall at the college. This talk is sponsored by the Friends of the Amherst College Library.
Daniel Hall has published two collections of poetry. Hermit with Landscape was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1989. Strange Relation was selected by Mark Doty for the National Poetry Series in 1996. Hall has received awards and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation, among others. He teaches poetry writing at Amherst College.
Poet Thom Gunn, born in Kent, England, in 1929, spent time in the British national service and in Paris before enrolling in Trinity College, Cambridge. Since 1954 he has lived in San Francisco, where he studied poetry with Yvor Winters at Stanford University.
Gunn has written many books of poetry published in the United States and Britain, including Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), Frontiers of Gossip (1998), Collected Poems (1994), The Man with Night Sweats (1992), The Passages of Joy (1983), Selected Poems 1950-1975 (1979), Jack Straw's Castle (1976), To the Air (1974), Moly, and My Sad Captains (1971), Touch (1968), The Sense of Movement (1959) and several collections of essays.
Among the honors Gunn has received are a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. He teaches at the University of California in Berkeley and was the Robert Frost Library
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