Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life

Nott, who coedited 2022’s The Letters of Thom Gunn, delivers an assured biography of the iconoclastic poet, who died in 2004. Raised in WWII-era England, Gunn was profoundly affected by the suicide of his mother when he was 15, after which he became withdrawn and took up poetry to work through his emotions. Nott traces Gunn’s development as an artist, exploring how early stabs at metrical poems gave way to free verse experimentation and such idiosyncratic forms as “gossip” poems that dealt with “complex ideas like identity and self-reflection” while dishing on Gunn’s acquaintances. Balancing literary analysis with a vivid account of Gunn’s boundary-pushing personal life, Nott details the poet’s open relationship with longtime partner Mike Kitay, whom Gunn met while attending Cambridge University and lived with in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood for much of his life. Gunn was active in San Francisco’s drug scene and a frequent user of LSD, which he credited with helping “my writing in many ways.” The great achievement of Nott’s biography is that it shows how poetry influenced Gunn’s life and how his life influenced his poetry, discussing, for instance, how reading Shakespeare and Stendhal made Gunn feel “as if anything were possible” and how he intended his 1971 collection, Moly, to be “an invitation to discuss homosexuality and LSD.” The result is a triumphant celebration of a larger-than-life writer. Agent: David Godwin, David Godwin Assoc. (June)