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A Romantic Mann
In Jeff Mann's collection, the sweaty essence of masculinity imbues each verse - whether the poet is offering his take on Grendel, a sumptuous meal in a New Orleans fine restaurant, or evoking his childhood in Appalachia. Folklore and food and fraught coupling are his inspiration, with which he spins desires into words for the ear.
- GenresPoetry
Audible Audio
First published April 6, 2013
34 people want to read
About the author
Jeff Mann
105 books88 followersJeff Mann’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in many publications, including Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Laurel Review and The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. He has published three award-winning poetry chapbooks, Bliss, Mountain Fireflies, and Flint Shards from Sussex; two full-length books of poetry, Bones Washed with Wine and On the Tongue; a collection of personal essays, Edge: Travels of an Appalachian Leather Bear; a book of poetry and memoir, Loving Mountains, Loving Men; and a short fiction volume, A History of Barbed Wire, which won a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches creative writing at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 9, 2016
So far, Jeff Mann has made me eat my prejudices against present tense and shifter stories. Now he’s added another former pet hate to the formerly unpalatable mix: poetry.
Poetry always reminds me of school essays and forays into incomprehension. Of words tortured until they fit a required pattern. My analytical brain screams if it can’t push the meaning into neat little slots.
But I quickly had to eat another helping of humble pie as I gradually learned to relax and listen to the words. Sometimes their meaning was as clear as a bell, but at other times, it was the roar of a symphony when each instrument added its own presence, and I had to content myself with listening to the overall sound rather than try to pick out each instrument’s contribution.
As I read them out loud I was reminded that sometimes poetry is best experienced that way. Then we don’t get hung up on words but rather the feelings that the phrases and sounds invoke.
All of the pieces in the collection were outpourings on subjects that inspired the writer to see them from a different angle or at least pay tribute to them. September 11 prompted musings on the bravery of Mark Bingham, the gay rugby player who helped ensure the final plane did not find its target.
As an associate professor at Virginia Tech, Jeff’s anger could also be felt in another poem where he dreams of carrying out a preemptive strike against the perpetrator of the massacre of 32 students and staff.
But his poems don’t just deal with outside events like these and the rape of the countryside, they also mourn the inevitability of ageing, the end of relationships, the lust after the sexiest man in Europe.
Poetry allows intensity of feelings to shine through. Anger reverberates in his hatred of the rape of the landscape in his beloved Appalachians as mining decapitates mountains.
But probably the one that best exemplifies Jeff’s work is “Alan Turing Memorial—Manchester”. Here, poetry allows a degree of artificiality that can detract from a prose story but beautifully links the connotations of the word “Apple”: “Apple of the golden Strongbow cider pints I sip on Anal Treet, reddened buttocks of a muffled bound-down boy marked by sadist’s teeth, plump apple of the wisdom tree, of “Snow White,” your favorite fairy tale, apple plump and bitten on my laptop lid, found half-eaten by your body, by your bed.”
His trip to Europe and Amsterdam, the gay capital of Europe, inspired another moving poem: “Homomonument, Amsterdam” in this, he has the classic line: “Those deaths become our whetstone.” Because this is how I believe Jeff sees himself. The words of his poetry and books are a sword to strike down existing prejudices, to avenge the honor of those who have fallen by the hatred and ignorance of the past and to fight for a fair future for his fellow gay brothers.
I’m glad I had read his essays and books prior to this as themes appeared that I was already familiar with. The obsession with Tim McGraw, the dreams of kidnap and bondage, the love of traditional Appalachian cooking. All these themes are revisited in his poems. But there is so much more here.
Like many poets he is disillusioned and disenchanted with the ordinary world around him. “The earth is beautiful, its people unaccommodating.”
He beautifully encompasses the regretful memories of a past lover: I sit in the sun, nibbling and sipping, wondering how love survives betrayal, how passion remains, decades later, for those who can never forgive. How we diminish, thankful for comfort, uneven, kindness, sunlight on October-orange maple leaves. How we mature, tired of romancing pain.”
Like all good poetry, I was taken out of my comfort zone. In this case trying to analyze things I probably wasn’t meant to and slapped back into appreciating what I was listening to instead. As usual it expanded my knowledge. In this case, I had to research words and phrases: Aeloian, Locrian, Phyrgian, Lydian and Mixolydian (musical terms depicting different progressions of notes). I was momentarily confused by Ionian and Dorian seeing them initially as eras of Greek architecture until I realized they were also being used in their musical context. Strappado was a new word for me but beautifully conjured up the torture he wanted to inflict on the perpetrator of the massacre. Followed by the beautiful alliteration in “God’s glowing grindstones, keen-edged eviscerations.” However, I’m still working on eg: apotropaic as buckeye.
And to borrow again from his ode to Alan Turing: “I will speak again and again of what men like you could not.” To me, this sums up the essence of what drives Jeff Mann. Hopefully, his poetry will last long after all of us are no longer walking this earth. His words can remain behind like mythical swords that readers can take up and wield, or whose sharpness can cut those who stumble on them, unable or unwilling to grasp their meaning.
Poetry always reminds me of school essays and forays into incomprehension. Of words tortured until they fit a required pattern. My analytical brain screams if it can’t push the meaning into neat little slots.
But I quickly had to eat another helping of humble pie as I gradually learned to relax and listen to the words. Sometimes their meaning was as clear as a bell, but at other times, it was the roar of a symphony when each instrument added its own presence, and I had to content myself with listening to the overall sound rather than try to pick out each instrument’s contribution.
As I read them out loud I was reminded that sometimes poetry is best experienced that way. Then we don’t get hung up on words but rather the feelings that the phrases and sounds invoke.
All of the pieces in the collection were outpourings on subjects that inspired the writer to see them from a different angle or at least pay tribute to them. September 11 prompted musings on the bravery of Mark Bingham, the gay rugby player who helped ensure the final plane did not find its target.
As an associate professor at Virginia Tech, Jeff’s anger could also be felt in another poem where he dreams of carrying out a preemptive strike against the perpetrator of the massacre of 32 students and staff.
But his poems don’t just deal with outside events like these and the rape of the countryside, they also mourn the inevitability of ageing, the end of relationships, the lust after the sexiest man in Europe.
Poetry allows intensity of feelings to shine through. Anger reverberates in his hatred of the rape of the landscape in his beloved Appalachians as mining decapitates mountains.
But probably the one that best exemplifies Jeff’s work is “Alan Turing Memorial—Manchester”. Here, poetry allows a degree of artificiality that can detract from a prose story but beautifully links the connotations of the word “Apple”: “Apple of the golden Strongbow cider pints I sip on Anal Treet, reddened buttocks of a muffled bound-down boy marked by sadist’s teeth, plump apple of the wisdom tree, of “Snow White,” your favorite fairy tale, apple plump and bitten on my laptop lid, found half-eaten by your body, by your bed.”
His trip to Europe and Amsterdam, the gay capital of Europe, inspired another moving poem: “Homomonument, Amsterdam” in this, he has the classic line: “Those deaths become our whetstone.” Because this is how I believe Jeff sees himself. The words of his poetry and books are a sword to strike down existing prejudices, to avenge the honor of those who have fallen by the hatred and ignorance of the past and to fight for a fair future for his fellow gay brothers.
I’m glad I had read his essays and books prior to this as themes appeared that I was already familiar with. The obsession with Tim McGraw, the dreams of kidnap and bondage, the love of traditional Appalachian cooking. All these themes are revisited in his poems. But there is so much more here.
Like many poets he is disillusioned and disenchanted with the ordinary world around him. “The earth is beautiful, its people unaccommodating.”
He beautifully encompasses the regretful memories of a past lover: I sit in the sun, nibbling and sipping, wondering how love survives betrayal, how passion remains, decades later, for those who can never forgive. How we diminish, thankful for comfort, uneven, kindness, sunlight on October-orange maple leaves. How we mature, tired of romancing pain.”
Like all good poetry, I was taken out of my comfort zone. In this case trying to analyze things I probably wasn’t meant to and slapped back into appreciating what I was listening to instead. As usual it expanded my knowledge. In this case, I had to research words and phrases: Aeloian, Locrian, Phyrgian, Lydian and Mixolydian (musical terms depicting different progressions of notes). I was momentarily confused by Ionian and Dorian seeing them initially as eras of Greek architecture until I realized they were also being used in their musical context. Strappado was a new word for me but beautifully conjured up the torture he wanted to inflict on the perpetrator of the massacre. Followed by the beautiful alliteration in “God’s glowing grindstones, keen-edged eviscerations.” However, I’m still working on eg: apotropaic as buckeye.
And to borrow again from his ode to Alan Turing: “I will speak again and again of what men like you could not.” To me, this sums up the essence of what drives Jeff Mann. Hopefully, his poetry will last long after all of us are no longer walking this earth. His words can remain behind like mythical swords that readers can take up and wield, or whose sharpness can cut those who stumble on them, unable or unwilling to grasp their meaning.
May 2, 2013
Every year, when I visit the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, I'm lucky enough to be in the company of some of the finest GLBT poets for a few days. It's where I met Mark Doty, and Robert Walker. It's also where I met Jeff Mann, who - as I said yesterday - has an absolute lyrical finesse with his prose that I find astounding. I first fell in love with his prose through short fiction and then his novels. He has a facility with mixing dichotomies - pain and pleasure, tenderness and BDSM, poetry and the guttural - that it's no surprise he's a poet as well as a novelist, a short fiction author, and - oh, hey - a professor who is kind enough to translate that talent into the hands of others.
I am not a poet - I don't have the gift. But I do have appreciation, and I just finished Jeff Mann's latest poetry collection, A Romantic Mann, and I barely know where to begin. One recurrent theme of the collection is of course the south - and the food of the south - as well as the weight of history (especially that of Mann's heritage homeland of Scotland). A sip of scotch, the texture of particular meals, a lick of sweat - the evocation of the sense of taste is at the forefront of many of the poems, and artfully so.
A Romantic Mann is broken into four books, and though I couldn't stop myself from gobbling the whole over two days, I would say that the four divisions of the book are an important series of divides. I found the progression - and the arrangement within each book - to be purposeful and impactful; if I'm imagining progressions that weren't intentional, it's on my head, but each book held a different set of reactions for me as the reader.
Book One is a perfect introduction to the oppositions Mann spins so beautifully. Longing and brutality ("Gredel"), humour and wit (the "Failed Romantic" poems, of which there are three, and I adored them), and throughout all the mix of sweat, scent, and the interplay between men openly or otherwise lusting or loving each other ("Erotic Letter," "Relic," "Getting a Piece," "Romantic Weekend.")
Book Two sent me briefly to the internet to learn a bit more about musical modes, as each poem title - and tone - is crafted with a particular mode in mind. I adored the set in full, but the sheer anger and frustration of natural devastation in "Locrian" was stunning, and the beautiful sense of beginnings-that-never-were (but could-have-been) captured in "Ionian" was a kind of quiet joy.
Book Three had moments so powerful I quite literally had to stop for a moment a few times. "Sugar Maples in October" was a brilliant piece that honoured Mark Bingham. A single line from "4x4" - I seem to have borrowed every gesture I own. - threw me into a tailspin of memories of my own, paralleled by the tale of father-and-son in the piece. Another poem, "Three Crosses," brought tears to my eyes with the vivid heat of vengeance and fury that we so often feel in the face what feels like our own impotence. And - oh - "Alan Turing Memorial - Manchester" was just so damn perfect. My husband and I went to see the exhibit when we were in London, and again, the complex and complicated emotions seeing his artifacts are so masterfully summarized in this poem. I will speak again and again of what men like you could not.
Book four brings the whole collection to a close with pieces brought from times, places, and events that leave the reader closing on another pair of sometimes opposing feelings; that the love expressed in so many different ways will - of course - come to a close, but this is not necessarily something to fear. Monuments of loss, grand cathedrals built in the name of a religion that thought nothing of raping a sodomite with a burning poker - these are legacies of pain, but I felt a kind of scarred healing throughout the telling of their tales ("Homomonument," "Gloucester Cathedral.") We move. We move on. And all these loves - whether they were brutal or sad in their ending, or hopeful and joyful in whatever brief times they might have had in the light - are worth it.
I'm not a poet. I am, however, so glad I read these poems.
I am not a poet - I don't have the gift. But I do have appreciation, and I just finished Jeff Mann's latest poetry collection, A Romantic Mann, and I barely know where to begin. One recurrent theme of the collection is of course the south - and the food of the south - as well as the weight of history (especially that of Mann's heritage homeland of Scotland). A sip of scotch, the texture of particular meals, a lick of sweat - the evocation of the sense of taste is at the forefront of many of the poems, and artfully so.
A Romantic Mann is broken into four books, and though I couldn't stop myself from gobbling the whole over two days, I would say that the four divisions of the book are an important series of divides. I found the progression - and the arrangement within each book - to be purposeful and impactful; if I'm imagining progressions that weren't intentional, it's on my head, but each book held a different set of reactions for me as the reader.
Book One is a perfect introduction to the oppositions Mann spins so beautifully. Longing and brutality ("Gredel"), humour and wit (the "Failed Romantic" poems, of which there are three, and I adored them), and throughout all the mix of sweat, scent, and the interplay between men openly or otherwise lusting or loving each other ("Erotic Letter," "Relic," "Getting a Piece," "Romantic Weekend.")
Book Two sent me briefly to the internet to learn a bit more about musical modes, as each poem title - and tone - is crafted with a particular mode in mind. I adored the set in full, but the sheer anger and frustration of natural devastation in "Locrian" was stunning, and the beautiful sense of beginnings-that-never-were (but could-have-been) captured in "Ionian" was a kind of quiet joy.
Book Three had moments so powerful I quite literally had to stop for a moment a few times. "Sugar Maples in October" was a brilliant piece that honoured Mark Bingham. A single line from "4x4" - I seem to have borrowed every gesture I own. - threw me into a tailspin of memories of my own, paralleled by the tale of father-and-son in the piece. Another poem, "Three Crosses," brought tears to my eyes with the vivid heat of vengeance and fury that we so often feel in the face what feels like our own impotence. And - oh - "Alan Turing Memorial - Manchester" was just so damn perfect. My husband and I went to see the exhibit when we were in London, and again, the complex and complicated emotions seeing his artifacts are so masterfully summarized in this poem. I will speak again and again of what men like you could not.
Book four brings the whole collection to a close with pieces brought from times, places, and events that leave the reader closing on another pair of sometimes opposing feelings; that the love expressed in so many different ways will - of course - come to a close, but this is not necessarily something to fear. Monuments of loss, grand cathedrals built in the name of a religion that thought nothing of raping a sodomite with a burning poker - these are legacies of pain, but I felt a kind of scarred healing throughout the telling of their tales ("Homomonument," "Gloucester Cathedral.") We move. We move on. And all these loves - whether they were brutal or sad in their ending, or hopeful and joyful in whatever brief times they might have had in the light - are worth it.
I'm not a poet. I am, however, so glad I read these poems.
September 16, 2017
A Romantic Mann is a terrific collection that gathers some of Mann’s best work in one slim, yet powerful volume. It’s split into four parts: the first dealing with romanticism (though this pops up other places as well), the second has a musical theme, the third has a homespun Appalachian bent along with some poems reacting to the student massacre at Virginia Tech where Mann teachers, and the fourth features poems with European locales. Mann’s poetry is nothing short of spectacular, and it’s a treat to have all these pieces from various magazines and anthologies bound in one adroitly organized anthology. If you’ve never read Mann’s verse before, you really should. It’s epic in a way you’ll never forget.
September 26, 2023
Read this for the second time today. Like the first reading, I could not put it down, and was pulled through by the passion and imagery from poem to poem. Mann's early training in forestry is in evidence in these poems; tulip trees, beechnuts, milkweed pods figure vividly and beautifully as men's beards, arms, torsos. As I said in an Amazon review the first time I read it, these poems made me think as much as feel, and they made me feel a lot. Love, relationships, time, aging, Appalachia, and acknowledging, naming, dealing with, healing from the the hatred and violence directed at men who love men - these are the subjects that make Mann, as Trebor Healey says on the back cover, "the gay epic poet of our age".
Consider these lines from "Alan Turing Memorial - Manchester":
"How are queers like West Virginians? asks the queer
West Virginian. Ha ha, so might begin an excellent
gay joke or hillbilly jest. Because we're all sick of
being mocked, and so we gather the names of fame
about us, those who prove how fine we might become."
And those last lines of the poem:
"...The prince eats the poisoned apple,
true, just as you chose to do...
Body and sense seep back slowly after such a tomb,
after such an icy sleep. He will lie here awhile, panting
in the sun, gathering his drowsy strength, stroking
warmth into his long-numb skin, till all the bliss
he's missed grips his hand and pulls him to his feet."
These short quotes cannot capture the splendor of this lengthy poem. In it all Mann's skill and love and knowledge and craft, as a poet and a plants-man, with a heart both tender and fierce, blooming in the world and rooted in the mountains of West Virginia, are on display.
Among the other poems, "The Failed Romantic Seduces a Blueberry Bar" is a favorite ("How we diminish, thankful for/comfort, unevent, kindness,/sunlight on October-orange maple leaves./How we mature, tired of romancing pain.") The Failed Romantic makes several appearances throughout the first section and I like them all. "Grendel" offers Grendel's version of what drives him to the mead hall. Hauntingly, his arm "...grows back.../hell-bulb gnarling towards/the cave mouth and the northern spring."
I can read these poems over and over and find something fresh each time, even within the same hour.
On a personal note, I thank the author for teaching me that one can just walk into a bookstore, grab any book of poetry that seems appealing, and start reading, without having to be A Poetry Expert or Knowing For Sure What It All Means. Poetry is for the people. Go ahead and enjoy some now.
Consider these lines from "Alan Turing Memorial - Manchester":
"How are queers like West Virginians? asks the queer
West Virginian. Ha ha, so might begin an excellent
gay joke or hillbilly jest. Because we're all sick of
being mocked, and so we gather the names of fame
about us, those who prove how fine we might become."
And those last lines of the poem:
"...The prince eats the poisoned apple,
true, just as you chose to do...
Body and sense seep back slowly after such a tomb,
after such an icy sleep. He will lie here awhile, panting
in the sun, gathering his drowsy strength, stroking
warmth into his long-numb skin, till all the bliss
he's missed grips his hand and pulls him to his feet."
These short quotes cannot capture the splendor of this lengthy poem. In it all Mann's skill and love and knowledge and craft, as a poet and a plants-man, with a heart both tender and fierce, blooming in the world and rooted in the mountains of West Virginia, are on display.
Among the other poems, "The Failed Romantic Seduces a Blueberry Bar" is a favorite ("How we diminish, thankful for/comfort, unevent, kindness,/sunlight on October-orange maple leaves./How we mature, tired of romancing pain.") The Failed Romantic makes several appearances throughout the first section and I like them all. "Grendel" offers Grendel's version of what drives him to the mead hall. Hauntingly, his arm "...grows back.../hell-bulb gnarling towards/the cave mouth and the northern spring."
I can read these poems over and over and find something fresh each time, even within the same hour.
On a personal note, I thank the author for teaching me that one can just walk into a bookstore, grab any book of poetry that seems appealing, and start reading, without having to be A Poetry Expert or Knowing For Sure What It All Means. Poetry is for the people. Go ahead and enjoy some now.
November 29, 2015
2013 Rainbow Awards Honorable Mention (5* from at least 1 judge)
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