That year, Gunn published a second collection of essays with an interview, "Shelf Life", and his substantial" Collected Poems", which David Biespiel hailed as a highlight of the century's poetry: "Thom Gunn is a poet of 'comradely love.' Compassion has always been his domain and his work's principal emotion. If 20th century verse written in English can be seen as a battle between memory and voice - between the phenomena and its history, on the one hand, and the poet's conviction and feeling about it, on the other - then Gunn's importance lies in the accuracy with which he unifies the language and emotion of experience. You're not sure where one ends and the other starts. The result is that his poems find the limits of their imaginative territory and then push beyond that." His final book of poetry was "Boss Cupid" (2000).