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Amazon.com's Price: $13.00 Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780374530686
ISBN: 0374530688
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 96
Publication Date: April 17, 2007
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: April 17, 2007
Sales Rank: 895631
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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. It is also one of the few works of literature that have fully met both the aesthetic and the moral challenges that the AIDS epidemic poses. The nobility and sobriety of Thom Gunn’s forms enhance and underscore the gravity and pathos of his subjects. The results have the cathartic and healing power of great art.
Amazon.com Review:
In the title poem of Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats, the speaker wakes from a nightmare of 'mind reduced to hurry' and 'flesh reduced and wrecked.' In this haunting prelude to his laments for friends lost to AIDS, he explores his own body for damage, and concludes, Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.
As this avalanche of tragedy begins to slide down the hills of Gunn's adopted San Francisco, the poems themselves change form. They cascade from the elegiac couplets of 'The J Car,' about the decline of a gym owner, into the harrowing free verse of 'In Time of Plague,' in which the speaker remembers being too 'afraid of the strength / of my own health' to indulge with 'Brad and John, these fiercely attractive men / who want me to stick their needle in my arm.' Gunn's understated emotional weariness is especially compelling when read alongside the book's many songs of innocence. The simple 'Seesaw,' for example, provides an ars poetica that applies equally to life: 'So it ends / as it begins. / Off we climb / And no one wins.' Although the specter of plague stands behind much of the book, he maintains the tense prosodic trajectory he's followed since 1954's Fighting Terms. His long California residency aside, Gunn writes the best British poetry of his generation, and The Man with Night Sweats is his finest book to date. --Edward Skoog
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Gunn with Feeling!
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 ... Read More
Rating:  - Beautiful, sad, and moving poetry
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. ... Read More
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Dewey Decimal Number: 811
EAN: 9780374530686
ISBN: 0374530688
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 96
Publication Date: April 17, 2007
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: April 17, 2007
Sales Rank: 895631
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux