Thom Gunn A cool queer life

Nott, an editor of The Letters of Thom Gunn (2022), skillfully balances scholarship with the human aspects of Gunn's poetry-rich life in this thoroughly engaging biography. Born in 1929 in Gravesend, England, Gunn had a peaceful childhood along with his younger brother, raised by journalist parents whose private lives were far from peaceful. His mother's suicide when he was 15 instigated his lifelong search for family and security. At Cambridge, Gunn met and fell in love with American Mike Kitay and followed him to America in 1954, settling in San Francisco until his death in 2004. 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. Gunn's poems bridge old and new worlds. He preferred his "resolutely unfamous" life in America to that of England even as he received numerous prestigious awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Gunn's sexuality gradually revealed itself along with a changing culture. The Man with Night Sweats, written during the AIDS pandemic, remains a classic. Poetry-lovers and admirers of Gunn's work in particular will greatly appreciate Nott's illumination of the poet's "cool queer life."

Nott, who coedited 2022's The Letters of Thom Gunn, delivers an assured biography of the iconoclastic poet, who died in 2004. Raised in WWII-era England, Gunn was profoundly affected by the suicide of his mother when he was 15, after which he became withdrawn and took up poetry to work through his emotions. Nott traces Gunn's development as an artist, exploring how early stabs at metrical poems gave way to free verse experimentation and such idiosyncratic forms as "gossip" poems that dealt with "complex ideas like identity and self-reflection" while dishing on Gunn's acquaintances. Balancing literary analysis with a vivid account of Gunn's boundary-pushing personal life, Nott details the poet's open relationship with longtime partner Mike Kitay, whom Gunn met while attending Cambridge University and lived with in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for much of his life. Gunn was active in San Francisco's drug scene and a frequent user of LSD, which he credited with helping "my writing in many ways." 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. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Assoc. (June)