9780571362578_

The first biography of Thom Gunn, and likely the definitive one. [...] Notts book is one of the best versions of a gay relationship conducted over this half century. Colm Tóibín
Michael Notts brilliant and necessary new biography Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a comprehensive study of a major poets investigations of the paradoxical liberation and constraint of queer desire. Los Angeles Review of Books
[Nott] has set out here to produce a work sturdy enough to support decades of future commentary on Gunn. Hes succeeded-this book is everything you ever wanted to know about Thom Gunn but had not even thought about asking. New York Times Book Review
The virtues of Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life are many: a total command of Gunns life; a clear, though hardly idolatrous, affection for its subject; and a true critics touch. The Baffler

The eagerly awaited, no-holds-barred biography of the great poet: an intellectual maverick, sexual rebel and icon of queer literature.
Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a landmark study of one of Englands - and Americas - most innovative and revolutionary poets. Michael Nott chronicles, for the first time, Gunns largely undocumented life: his childhood in Kent and London, his mothers suicide, and his mind-opening education at Cambridge, where he read Shakespeare and John Donne, wrote his first book, Fighting Terms, and met the man who was to become his life partner - Mike Kitay.
In his mid-twenties, Gunn followed Kitay to America and became one of the great poet-documenters of San Franciscos queer culture, capturing both the hippie mentality of the time and his own visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Through the eighties and beyond, Gunn found himself in the midst of the AIDS crisis, recording its catastrophic impact in T he Man with Night Sweats, poems that provide, too, its most poignant epitaph.
Gunn was not a confessional poet, but inseparable from his rigorous formal poetry was a ravenous embracing of life and an acute awareness of death. Michael Nott, co-editor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunns poetry to bring us a vivid portrait of a great literary mind, sexual rebel and queer icon.

...

Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life

Comentarios