Concise, witty and perhaps surprisingly grim, this second collection from Mann (Complaint in the Garden
) pays homage to the titular poet, the British-born, San Francisco–resident Thom Gunn (who died in 2004). Mann emulates Gunn's signature virtues: a wry, careful tone; tight rhymed and unrhymed forms; explicit delight in sex between men, and in the modern culture of gay liberation; and an appreciation for the Bay Area. Yet compared to his model, Mann sounds less in love with life, more attentive to death: “I want lust/ as cold, precise and prescriptive/ as the en dash of a dead man,” one poem concludes; another, set on Mann's birthday, declares, “If life is ruin,/ then let it burn like Rome.” Poems set in Florida, where Mann spent an unhappy youth, pose stark counterpoints to Mann's cityscapes. Arch verses about the poetry industry (“A younger poet wrote to ask/ an older for a blurb”) offset what seems most personal elsewhere. Mixing literary sophistication with a visceral self-distrust, even paraphrasing Catullus (“wanting// again, a man I do not want”), Mann makes his dislikes at least as vivid as his admirations. On the whole, the collection is memorable as homage, but surprisingly far from what Gunn himself once named “The Passages of Joy.” (Apr.)
