-I write about love, I write about friendship,- remarked Thom Gunn: -I find that they are absolutely intertwined.- These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and shed new light on -one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century- (Times Literary Supplement).
These letters reveal the evolution of Gunn-s work and illuminate the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother-s suicide; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).
