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The eagerly awaited, no-holds-barred biography of the great poet: an intellectual maverick, sexual rebel and icon of queer literature.
Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a landmark study of one of England's - and America's - most innovative and revolutionary poets. Michael Nott chronicles, for the first time, 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.
Gunn was not a confessional poet, but inseparable from his rigorous formal poetry was a ravenous embracing of life and an acute awareness of death. Michael Nott, co-editor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn's poetry to bring us a vivid portrait of a great literary mind, sexual rebel and queer icon.
Author: Michael Nott
Hardback Published 15 October 2024 720 pages
'The first biography of Thom Gunn, and likely the definitive one. [...] Nott's book is one of the best versions of a gay relationship conducted over this half century.' --Colm Toibin
"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