The Man with Night Sweats: Poems
In the title poem of Thom Gunn'sThe 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 meAs if to shield it fromThe pains that will go through me,As if hands were enoughTo 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 anars poeticathat 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'sFighting Terms. His long California residency aside, Gunn writes  the best British poetry of his generation, andThe Man with Night  Sweatsis his finest book to date.--Edward Skoog