The Man With Night Sweats

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, sad, and moving poetry
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, sad, and moving poetry
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Gunn with Feeling!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Gunn with Feeling!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Keen, Impassioned, Beautiful
Review: Thom Gunn's work has always been admirable, but with some exceptions the earlier poems I don't find the earlier poems quite satisfactory; there is too much posing, and perhaps too much talk about "energy", and a slight stiffness of versification, and these defects make the verse distinctly inferior to Philip Larkin's.

With The Man with Night Sweats this ceases to be the case. The poems are roughly of three kinds: superb and moving domestic poems, like "The Hug"

"I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder blades against your chest."

and "An Invitation"

"...Beyond the fence, where over fox-
glove, mint, and ribs of fern, the small dark plain
Fingers of ivy graze my pane.
(Perhaps before you come I'll snip them off.)"

which are probably the best recent poems of their kind; some animal poems, of which "Patch Work" (about a mockingbird) is the best:

"Lifted upon the wing
Of that patched body, that inistence
Which fills the gardens up with headlong song."

the tender and beautiful poem "All do not all things well" (whose title is from a line in Thomas Campion's "Winter Nights") about a couple of "auto freaks":

"Their work one thing they knew
They could for certain do
With a disinterest
And passionate expertise
To which they gave their best
Desires and energies.
Such oily-handed zest
By-passed the self like love.
I thought that they were good
For any neighbourhood."

a few epigrams, a couple of dimeter "songs", and of course the AIDS poems. The very well-known title poem is probably the best of these, but there are several very good ones. There are detailed and graphic poems, like "Lament"; mythological ones, like "Terminal"; reminiscent ones, like "To Isherwood Dying"; some meditations on the theme of a dead athlete (a favourite topic of many gay writers, cf. A.E. Housman) or gym owner; and so on... enough variety to give a unified artistic account of the horror of those times.

In terms of sheer total quality, this might be the best poetry book of the 1990s, or at least a close second to Seamus Heaney's "Spirit Level".