With an illuminating new preface by Colm Tóibín, here is Thom Gunn’s extraordinary memorial to love, life and death in the time of the AIDS crisis

The Man With Night Sweats, originally published in 1992, sees Thom Gunn writing at the height of his powers. The collection begins with poems that celebrate love and sex and bodies – whether the exuberance of a swimming otter, the nimble moves of a tow-headed skateboarder or the habituated coming together of two old lovers. In devastating contrast, the poems in the last section are unflinching portraits and accounts of the illness and deaths of friends during the AIDS epidemic. Written out of a lifetime’s experience of perfecting his art, these poems are unsurpassed in elegiac intensity and among the most poignant responses to those terrible times.