Book description
Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats shows him writing at the
height of his powers, equally in command of classical forms and of
looser, more colloquial measures, and ready to address a wide range of
themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a set of poems
about the deaths of friends from AIDS. With their unflinching
directness, compassion and grace, they are among the most moving
statements yet to have been provoked by the disease.
Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent in 1929. After National Service
and a short time living in Paris, he enrolled at Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he read English. He published his first book of poems,
Fighting Terms, while he was still an undergraduate. In 1954 he moved to
San Francisco and held a one-year Fellowship at Stanford University. He
published over thirty books of poetry, including The Man with Night
Sweats, which won the Forward Prize for Poetry in 1992, and Boss Cupid
(2000). Thom Gunn died in 2004.
