Books by Thom Gunn

In some respects a sequel to The Man With Night Sweats, Boss Cupid is a memorialising of friends who have died, an anatomy of survival, and a self-portrait of the poet in age. The poems are written under the sign of Cupid, 'devious master of our bodies', but their intimacies are always heard against the sociable human hum of an entire community which Gunn depicts in poems of fluent grace, as formal as they are relaxed.

Thom Gunn's The Man With Night Sweats shows him writing at the height of his powers, equally in command of classical forms and of looser, more colloquial measures, and ready to address a wide range of themes, both intimate and social. The book ends with a set of poems about the deaths of friends from AIDS. With their unflinching directness, compassion and grace, they are among the most moving statements yet to have been provoked by the disease.

Accompanied by insightful notes, this title features poems that represents the full arc of Thom Gunn's career.

The Passages of Joy, published in 1982, saw Thom Gunn writing at the height of his powers. The poems combine personal directness with an apparently effortless technical assurance.

Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was educated at Cambridge University, and had his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms, published while still an undergraduate. His last collection was Boss Cupid (2000). In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past.

Gunn's work illustrates the debates poetry in English has pursued in this century - form versus improvization, diction versus talk, the American way versus the English tradition, and even, at times, authenticity versus art.