Phoenix Poets: Breakfast with Thom Gunn (PDF)

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 pilot's 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 formof obfuscation: see how the bay is a graydeepening into gray, the color of heartbreak.Randall Mann's 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 "e;pitiless,"e; the trees "e;thin and bloodless,"e; the words "e;like the icy water"e; of the San Francisco Bay. Mann, fiercely intelligent, open yet elusive, draws on the "e;graceful erosion"e; 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"e;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."e;-Kenyon Review