There are two basic types of poetic biography: the critical study with biographical elements, and the complete life for scholarly posterity. Nott’s is the latter, with an emphasis on 'complete' ... Has set out here to produce a work sturdy enough to support decades of future commentary on Gunn. He’s succeeded — this book is everything you ever wanted to know about Thom Gunn but had not even thought about asking.
Michael Nott has produced a consummately researched, intelligent and sympathetic biography – and, which matters most, he’s a very good reader of the poems – but it’s a bit overdutiful. Everything you want is in there; so is a lot you probably don’t.
Brilliant and necessary ... Comprehensive ... A singular portrait of a writer whose reflexive coolness informs an essential queerness, whose lyric voice is undergirded by a complex latticework of attachment, loss, and desire.
Nott’s scholarship is extremely impressive: he provides 144 pages of footnotes, attributing his sources to interviews, letters, notebooks, and diary entries. But this is not a dry, academic look at Gunn’s life: the biographer supplies a loving—though at times unflinchingly honest—view of the self-punishing poet. On top of that, we are taken into the artist’s compositional process—drafts and unfinished works are probed insightfully ... Nott has created an illuminating theatrical framework in which to chronicle Thom Gunn’s private life, adding resonance and significance to his beautiful poetry.
The virtues of Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life are many: a total command of Gunn’s life; a clear, though hardly idolatrous, affection for its subject; and a true critic’s touch ... Superb.
