The first biography of Thom Gunn: Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city's queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond.
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.
