Thom Gunn : a cool queer life

Nott, Michael2024

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Summary

'Thom Gunn' is a landmark study of one of England and America's most innovative and revolutionary poets. Michael Nott chronicles Gunn's largely undocumented life: his childhood in Kent and London, his mother's suicide, and his mind-opening education at Cambridge, where he read Shakespeare and John Donne, wrote his first book, 'Fighting Terms', and met the man who was to become his life partner - Mike Kitay. In his mid-twenties, Gunn followed Kitay to America and became one of the great poet-documenters of San Francisco's queer culture, capturing both the hippie mentality of the time and his own visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Through the eighties and beyond, Gunn found himself in the midst of the AIDS crisis, recording its catastrophic impact in 'The Man with Night Sweats', poems that provide, too, its most poignant epitaph.