The Man With Night Sweats
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Product Description
Product 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.
About the Author
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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Just to add a note of disagreement on the one star review above. This was my first introduction to Gunn's poems, and I found them accomplished, elegant and deeply moving.
Gunn maintains the formal poetic structures of his english roots (he went to Cambridge during the 50s and was influenced by his english contemporaries) with delicate metres and rhyme schemes. But he enthuses these with the informalism of theme and idiom from his Californian and American neighbours and friends after moving to the states in the sixties - admiring the beats, and their lifestyle, but never letting his own structured verse collapse.
This collection reflects the strengths of both these approaches, and with laments and memorials to lost friends and lovers to HIV (and puzzlement at his own survival) it sounds immediately fresh, honest and also with depth and wonderful surprises unveiled by reading aloud (preferably in bed at night to those you love). If in doubt read 'To Isherwood Dying'.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Fantastic. I can't think of a more moving book of poems about human frailty, love, friendship and death. I'd also like to contradict the information in the one-star review: there's very little to do with nature in this book and neither is there really that wide a variety of disparate themes. The vast majority of poems are actually urban elegies addressed to dead or dying friends. Gunn is gay and many of the poems address the AIDS crisis in its first Western manifestation in metropolitan centres in the 1980s. It's an incredibly powerful and heart-breaking collection, partly because it is so focussed on the human body and the pains it goes through. Highly, highly recommended.
1 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The best of this group of poems was powerful and tender, but they did seem to have a variety of disparate themes, which didn't help. There was also a feeling that the descriptions of nature were acting as a block instead of a conduit to the actual sense of them.
That said, I would certainly buy other works by this poet.
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