Description:
With an illuminating new introduction by Colm Tóibín, here is Thom Gunn's extraordinary memorial to love, life, and death in the time of the AIDS crisis.
The Man with Night Sweats is a haunting depiction of a world ravaged by illness that is part elegy for those who have been lost and part evocation of the changes that await those who survive. Thom Gunn's collection is one of the few works of literature that have fully met both the aesthetic and the moral challenges that the AIDS epidemic posed. The "plague" Gunn refers to has a specific contemporary connotation, but it inevitably takes on other, wider meanings as well: historical, cultural, existential. His quiet, restrained lines, which draw frankly from the great tradition of English lyric verse, respond to the harrowing realities of his--our--world with a stupefying simplicity and directness. The nobility and sobriety of his forms enhance and underscore the gravity and pathos of his subjects. The results have the cathartic and healing power of great art. This edition, with a new introduction by Colm Tóibín and a striking cover image by David Hockney, proves that even thirty years on, The Man with Night Sweats is unsurpassed in its elegiac intensity.Brief description: Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was educated at Cambridge University and wrote his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms (1954), while he was still an undergraduate. He moved to Northern California in 1954 and taught at American universities until his death. His last collection was Boss Cupid (FSG, 2000).
Review Quotes: "Perhaps his most wary, moving, personal book to date. It is a forceful reminder that Gunn . . . is one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century . . . He writes of and from the modern climate, as if wholly at home here; these new poems have a claim to be some of the most authentic occasional poems of our time. - Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement