Breakfast With Thom Gunn

by Mann, Randall

• ISBN13: 9780226503448
• ISBN10: 0226503445
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Aubade Those who lack a talent for love have come to walk the long Pier 7. Here at the end of the imagined world are three low-flying gulls like lies on the surface; the slow red of a pilot's boat; the groan of a fisherman hacking a small shark and our speech like the icy water, a poor translation that will not carry us across. What brought us west, anyway? A hunger. But ours is no Donner Party, we who feed only on scenery, the safest form of obfuscation: see how the bay is a gray deepening into gray, the color of heartbreak. Randall Mann'sBreakfast with Thom Gunnis a work both direct and unsettling. Haunted by the afterlife of Thom Gunn (19292004), 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 inand aroused bya 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 forComplaint 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

Author Biography

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.

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Early Morning on Market Street Election Day

But Politics Fetish Song Queen Christina

The Mortician in San Francisco Aubade Bernal Hill

The Sunset Abandoned Landscapes Short Short Charity Ruin Pure Last Call

Pastoral Syntax Little Colonial Song

The Lake of Nostalgia

The End of Landscape Ode Night: A Fragment Breakfast with Thom Gunn Ovid in San Francisco Ganymede on Polk Street Orpheus at Café Flore Stranded Modern Art To Francis Bacon Reception Career Postcard from California The Long View N

Ocean Beach Translation Lexington Design

The Rape of Ganymede Colloquy between A and B Intimacy Monday Seeking Well, Here We Are A View South City Poetry Fiction

Notes

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