The Man With Night Sweats - Softcover

Gunn, Thom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571162576 ISBN 13: 9780571162574

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1992

Synopsis

Ranging from classical forms to looser more colloquial measures, this collection of poems addresses a daunting range of themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a sequence of poems about the deaths of the poet's friends from AIDS.

About this title

Review:

In the title poem of Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats, the speaker wakes from a nightmare of "mind reduced to hurry" and "flesh reduced and wrecked." In this haunting prelude to his laments for friends lost to AIDS, he explores his own body for damage, and concludes,

Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.

As this avalanche of tragedy begins to slide down the hills of Gunn's adopted San Francisco, the poems themselves change form. They cascade from the elegiac couplets of "The J Car," about the decline of a gym owner, into the harrowing free verse of "In Time of Plague," in which the speaker remembers being too "afraid of the strength / of my own health" to indulge with "Brad and John, these fiercely attractive men / who want me to stick their needle in my arm." Gunn's understated emotional weariness is especially compelling when read alongside the book's many songs of innocence. The simple "Seesaw," for example, provides an ars poetica that applies equally to life: "So it ends / as it begins. / Off we climb / And no one wins." Although the specter of plague stands behind much of the book, he maintains the tense prosodic trajectory he's followed since 1954's Fighting Terms. His long California residency aside, Gunn writes the best British poetry of his generation, and The Man with Night Sweats is his finest book to date. --Edward Skoog

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0571162576
• ISBN 13: 9780571162574
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96