Breakfast with Thom Gunn (Phoenix Poets)

ISBN: 0226503437

Author: Mann, Randall

Condition: New

Review With audacious wit and formal prowess equal to the master to whom he pays homage, Randall Mann has written a book both poignant and humorous, where one minute we stand above it all and the next minute we are reading the notes of the drowned. Mann invites us a into a ghastly metropolis, its emptiness and ruin nonetheless populated with remarkable sites of grace. If this were only the evacuated city, the nothingness behind us/the nothingness ahead, the permanent red of Ilium scattered with fallen bodies, the feral world of nonchalant disease, rent boys and assassins, it would simply be another note of irretrievable loss in the parade of human history. But with purling fountains and lush gardens, Mann reveals the transitory but beguiling beauty that holds despair in abeyance, that reminds us of why desire propels us forward. Soon we will be underground, he says, but for now we enjoy the cherries that dangle tantalizingly before us. -- D. A. Powell Published On: 2008-06-13Randall Manns second collection of poetry, Breakfast with Thom Gunn-aptly titled for its poetic inheritance of metrical clarity and its address of gay subculture-also uses moments of real social incident, transforming private history into odes to the afflicted. In this work, the many contradictions of desire touch the reader: politics, beauty, God, disease, love, art-all the worlds addictions-and it achieves an entertainment that is satisfying when harsh. -- Miguel Murphy - Rain Taxi Review of BooksFinalist, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry - Lambda Literary Award"[The] bright, ironic surfaces both render bearable Mann's dark vision and somehow exacerbate it--an ambivalence wholly appropriate to such frank, pained poems." -- Benjamin S. Grossberg - Antioch Review Product Description AubadeThose who lack a talent for love have cometo walk the long Pier 7. Here at the endof the imagined world are three low-flying gullslike lies on the surface; the slow redof a pilots boat; the groanof a fisherman hacking a small shark-and our speech like the icy water, a poortranslation that will not carry us across.What brought us west, anyway? A hunger.But ours is no Donner Party, we who feedonly on scenery, the safest form of obfuscation: see how the bay is a graydeepening into gray, the color of heartbreak.            Randall Manns Breakfast with Thom Gunn is a work both direct and unsettling. Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (1929-2004), one of the most beloved gay literary icons of the twentieth century, the poems are moored in Florida and California, but the backdrop is pitiless, the trees thin and bloodless, the words like the icy water of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the graceful erosion of both landscape and the body, on the beauty that lies in unbeauty. With audacity, anxiety, and unbridled desire, this gifted lyric poet grapples with dilemmas of the gay self embroiled in-and aroused by-a glittering, unforgiving subculture. Breakfast with Thom Gunnis at once formal and free, forging a sublime integrity in the fire of wit, intensity, and betrayal.Praise for Complaint in the Garden    We have before us a skillful, witty, passionate young poet. . . . Randall Mann is both attuned to and at odds with the natural world; he articulates the passions and predicaments of a self inside a massive, arousing, but sometimes brutal culture. And he accomplishes these things with buoyant lyric sensibilities and rejuvenating skills.-Kenyon Review   About the Author Randall Mann is a writer and editor who lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Complaint in the Garden, winner of the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry.