Gay icon, great poet, leather daddy, eccentric professor, English, American, biker, non-driver, drug addict, hedonist, intellectual, enigmatic, friendly, Everyman, one-of-a-kind, brother, roommate, HIV-negative, paradigmatic AIDS writer, Nazi belt wearer, Jeff Dahmer scholar, Guggenheim Genius, secret philanthropist, Formalist, Existentialist, prolific letter writer, some-sort-of-an-angel...Thom Gunn was all of these and more...

But hovering above these figures lay the memory of his mother, dead from suicide with her head in a gas oven...

And Thom at fifteen with a question he would take a lifetime answering ...

Oh mother, what did you do? This first book-length study of Thom Gunn's poetry argues that he was far from the generally accepted image of a private, formal, non-confessional and exclusively gay poet.

The 20th anniversary of Thom Gunn's death is a suitable moment to explore his work as a whole, especially in the context of the recently published and major biography that cast new light on this often enigmatic figure. His dead mother, whose body Gunn discovered when he was a teenager after she committed suicide, haunts his poetry. Dixon knew Gunn while a graduate student at Berkeley, and also brings the experience and insight of a trained psychotherapist to understand how trauma experienced at fifteen influenced Gunn throughout his life.