Gunn’s Life:
Thom Gunn was born and grew up in wartime England, son of two journalists. After his parents divorced, his mother committed suicide; her body was discovered by Thom and his younger brother. He did two years of national service, spent six months living in Paris, studied at Trinity College Cambridge, and came to California on a Stanford University fellowship in 1954. Gunn settled in San Francisco with his life partner Mike Kitay and spent the last 52 years of his life writing and teaching there.
Gunn’s Poems:
Gunn published his first book to great acclaim when he was just out of university. In the 1950s he was recognized as a rising poetic star in Britain (alongside Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin) for his technically assured poems of fierce philosophy. After his move to the US, he became increasingly involved in the counterculture, discovered free verse, his poetry experimented in both form and subject matter—he wrote about rebellion and violence, bikers and AIDS victims, drugs and gay life, love and decline.
Gunn and the AIDS Epidemic:
Thom Gunn was HIV-negative, but lived for 50 years at the center of American gay culture, in San Francisco. Even naysayers who decried the uneven quality of his anti-traditional, “anti-poetic” work after moving to California were moved by the power and respected the poetic achievement of his collection of laments and elegies from ground zero of the AIDS epidemic, The Man with Night Sweats, published in 1992.
Books by Thom Gunn:
- The Man with Night Sweats: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux or Noonday Press reprints, 1993)
- Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux or Noonday Press reprint, 1994)
- Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000)
- The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography (University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry series, 1999)
- Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview (University of Michigan Press, 1994)
- Thom Gunn in Conversation with James Campbell (Between the Lines, 2002)
