News at Eleven (Back Page): Thom Gunn was an English poet steeped

in the traditions of 16th-century prosody but equally at home in the countercultures of San Franscisco where he lived from the mid-1950s until his death. He wrote in strict metre and stanza form and also in the looser forms more associated with 20th-century American poetry. His series of laments for friends who died of Aids, collected in The Man with Night Sweats (1992), is as moving and eloquent a sequence as Thomas Hardy's poems of lament after 1912.

from The Guardian: Living in the memory

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