Thom Gunn - by Michael Nott (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could "give the dead a voice, make them sing" (Hilton Als, The New Yorker).

Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death.

Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city's queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was "an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity." Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn's poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself.

Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn's life: his traditional childhood in England; his mother's suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America's most innovative poets.

Review Quotes

"Thoroughly engaging . . . Nott's accounts of Gunn's experiences at each dramatic stage in his life are rewarding to read, while his drug-infused sexual and poetic experiments are, by turns, shocking and sublime." --Raúl Niño, Booklist (starred review)

"The great achievement of Nott's biography is that it shows how poetry influenced Gunn's life and how his life influenced his poetry, discussing, for instance, how reading Shakespeare and Stendhal made Gunn feel "as if anything were possible" and how he intended his 1971 collection, Moly, to be "an invitation to discuss homosexuality and LSD." The result is a triumphant celebration of a larger-than-life writer." --Publishers Weekly

"This is the Thom Gunn I came to know the last 20 years of his life and the world he inhabited. I find it startling that such a young scholar and writer who never crossed the man's path succeeds in bringing the subject in all his emotional and intellectual complexity so vividly back to life. I was deeply moved. But that is Michael Nott's rare gift, the artistry of the master biographer with genuine feeling for the man and his art he finds, justifiably, compelled to portray." --August Kleinzahler, author of Snow Approaching on the Hudson

"Thom Gunn was the most exciting poet of his generation, and he lived an exciting life. He loved adventure, but he was also self-disciplined and blessed with acute intelligence. If these sound like contradictions, they don't seem to flummox Michael Nott, who, though he never knew Gunn, gets him exactly as I remember him: kindly, courteous, self-deprecating, daring, playful, and a master of words. Nott's skill as a biographer is exactly suited to his subject. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is gripping from the start and beautifully written." --Clive Wilmer, author of New and Collected Poems

About the Author