Thom Gunn

“Thoroughly engaging … Nott’s accounts of Gunn’s experiences at each dramatic stage in his life are rewarding to read, while his drug-infused sexual and poetic experiments are, by turns, shocking and sublime.” –Raúl Niño, Booklist (starred review)

“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.” –Publishers Weekly

“This is the Thom Gunn I came to know the last 20 years of his life and the world he inhabited. I find it startling that such a young scholar and writer who never crossed the man’s path succeeds in bringing the subject in all his emotional and intellectual complexity so vividly back to life. I was deeply moved. But that is Michael Nott’s rare gift, the artistry of the master biographer with genuine feeling for the man and his art he finds, justifiably, compelled to portray.” –August Kleinzahler, author of Snow Approaching on the Hudson

“Thom Gunn was the most exciting poet of his generation, and he lived an exciting life. He loved adventure, but he was also self-disciplined and blessed with acute intelligence. If these sound like contradictions, they don’t seem to flummox Michael Nott, who, though he never knew Gunn, gets him exactly as I remember him: kindly, courteous, self-deprecating, daring, playful, and a master of words. Nott’s skill as a biographer is exactly suited to his subject. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is gripping from the start and beautifully written.” –Clive Wilmer, author of New and Collected Poems

Michael Nott is the author of Photopoetry, 1845-2015: A Critical History and an editor of The Letters of Thom Gunn. He lives in London, England.