Издания и произведения

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…