The Letters of Thom Gunn

The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry

＂I write about love, I write about friendship,＂ remarked Thom Gunn. ＂I find that they are absolutely intertwined.＂ These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on ＂one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century＂ (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement).

The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

Thom Gunn (1929-2004) was educated at Cambridge University and wrote his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms (1954), while he was still an undergraduate. He moved to Northern California in 1954 and taught at American universities until his death. His last collection was Boss Cupid (FSG, 2000).

August Kleinzahler is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and three collections of essays. He lives in San Francisco and was a close friend and neighbor of Thom Gunn’s for more than twenty years.

Michael Nott is the author of Photopoetry, 1845-2015: A Critical History (2018). He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and a postdoctoral fellow at University College Cork.

Clive Wilmer, who first met Thom Gunn in 1964, is the author of over half a dozen books of poetry, including New andCollected Poems (2012). He edited Gunn’s first collection of essays, The Occasions of Poetry (1982), and his New Selected Poems (2018). He is an emeritus fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.