The Man With Night Sweats

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.

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