The Man with Night Sweats is a haunting depiction of a world ravaged by illness that is part elegy for those who have been lost and part evocation of the changes that await those who survive. It is also one of the few works of literature that have fully met both the aesthetic and the moral challenges that the AIDS epidemic poses. The nobility and sobriety of Thom Gunn's forms enhance and underscore the gravity and pathos of his subjects. The results have the cathartic and healing power of great art.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
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 meAs 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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.
Review
"The tension of Gunn's famous earlier poems, which adventurously drew on classical themes (Achilles and Patroclus), pop icons (Presley and Brando), and existential extremes, has, in his first new collection in ten years, become muted and commemorative . . . Gunn moves with a colloquial ease and a kind of epigrammatic grace through a variety of quatrains, coupleted monologues, Skeltonic variations, and occasional free verse."—John Updike, The New Yorker
"The great and undeniable potency of The Man with Night Sweats comes from the poet's huge restraint, as much as from his tragic subject matter . . . The Man with Night Sweats shows a poet at the top of his form, gathering his world into art without ever choking off passion. The formidable craft behind these poems—the metrical, syllabic, and rhyming intricacy--is translucent, but there to buoy the emotion like an invisible net."—Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe
"Perhaps his most wary, moving, personal book to date. It is a forceful reminder that Gunn . . . is one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century . . . He writes of and from the modern climate, as if wholly at home here; these new poems have a claim to be some of the most authentic occasional poems of our time."—Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement
"What Gunn is continually attempting to grasp or understand in this book is the condition of those around him, strangers and lovers alike, and we treasure his tone of brotherly forbearance as he makes his way . . . Gunn is a definatly unsuitable poet—a formalist who often writes in free verse, an Englishman living in America, an autobiographical poet whose subjects elude the self . . . The book, divided into four sections, begins with poems boldly erotic and ends at 'death's door' . . . Yet amid all this astringent life experience, astonishingly, a profound hope emerges."—Henri Cole, The Nation
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
"The great and undeniable potency of The Man with Night Sweats comes from the poet's huge restraint, as much as from his tragic subject matter . . . The Man with Night Sweats shows a poet at the top of his form, gathering his world into art without ever choking off passion. The formidable craft behind these poems—the metrical, syllabic, and rhyming intricacy--is translucent, but there to buoy the emotion like an invisible net."—Matthew Gilbert, The Boston Globe
"Perhaps his most wary, moving, personal book to date. It is a forceful reminder that Gunn . . . is one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century . . . He writes of and from the modern climate, as if wholly at home here; these new poems have a claim to be some of the most authentic occasional poems of our time."—Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement
"What Gunn is continually attempting to grasp or understand in this book is the condition of those around him, strangers and lovers alike, and we treasure his tone of brotherly forbearance as he makes his way . . . Gunn is a definatly unsuitable poet—a formalist who often writes in free verse, an Englishman living in America, an autobiographical poet whose subjects elude the self . . . The book, divided into four sections, begins with poems boldly erotic and ends at 'death's door' . . . Yet amid all this astringent life experience, astonishingly, a profound hope emerges."—Henri Cole, The Nation
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful, sad, and moving poetry,
By
This review is from: The Man with Night Sweats: Poems (Paperback)
Thom Gunn is a masterful poet, and this is a book full of beauty and pain. Many of the poems deal directly with AIDS, many (such as the title work) with heroin use. And yet they are not preachy, or sentimental. He is in firm control of difficult subject matter.Also pleasing is his use of rhythm and meter -- Gunn is one of apparently few modern poets who still writes powerfully within a given meter and rhyme scheme. Not light or easy reading, these poems are sad and sobering. Tears are advised but not required.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gunn with Feeling!,
By
This review is from: The Man with Night Sweats: Poems (Paperback)
Thom Gunn's "Night Sweats" is one of his finest books of poetry. He is a master at writing lines that are so rhythmatic and flowing. These poems deal with AIDS and also drug use. They are not easy to read, and very sad at times. But they deal with problems and subjects most of us have had to face in the last 20 years, whether we liked it or not. There is true feeling and honesty here. I especially enjoyed "In the Time of Plague" and "Memory Unsettled." I recommend this book as part of your permanent collection to be read again and again. Thom Gunn's poetry is the best.
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