Man with Night Sweats: Poems

With an illuminating new introduction by Colm Tóibín, here is Thom Gunn's extraordinary memorial to love, life, and death in the time of the AIDS crisis.

The Man with Night Sweats is a haunting depiction of a world ravaged by illness that is part elegy for those who have been lost and part evocation of the changes that await those who survive.

Thom Gunn's collection is one of the few works of literature that have fully met both the aesthetic and the moral challenges that the AIDS epidemic posed. The "plague" Gunn refers to has a specific contemporary connotation, but it inevitably takes on other, wider meanings as well: historical, cultural, existential. His quiet, restrained lines, which draw frankly from the great tradition of English lyric verse, respond to the harrowing realities of his--our--world with a stupefying simplicity and directness. The nobility and sobriety of his forms enhance and underscore the gravity and pathos of his subjects. The results have the cathartic and healing power of great art.

This edition, with a new introduction by Colm Tóibín and a striking cover image by David Hockney, proves that even thirty years on, The Man with Night Sweats is unsurpassed in its elegiac intensity.