Gunn, Thom

(1929-2004)

   Born in Gravesend, Kent, the son of a journalist and newspaper editor, his mother seems to have inspired his future career. After National Service he graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1953, then moved to America with Mike Kitay, with whom he remained a companion until his death. He was awarded a writing fellowship at Stanford University, where he became a student of the poet and critic Yvor Winters and taught at Berkeley. He made his home in San Francisco, where he could be more open about his sexuality, expressed in The Passages of Joy (1982). His awards have been many across the world. "He was particularly honored for his powerful work in The Man with Night Sweats, a collection of laments and elegies of the AIDS epidemic published in 1992" (The San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 2004). Some of his other publications: Selected Poems, 1962. Positives, 1966. Poems, 1950-1966, 1967. Selected Poems 1950-1975, 1979. The Occasion of Poetry, 1982. Some of his poems: "Autobiography," "Cafeteria in Boston," "Jack Straw's Castle," "San Francisco Streets," "Talbot Road," "The Missing," "Transients and Residents."

   Sources: Biography of Thom Gunn (http://www.interviews-with-poets.com/thom-gunn/gunn-note.html). Collected Poems of Thom Gunn. Faber and Faber, 1994. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Threepenny: Kitay, Thom Gunn (http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/kitay_su05.html).