A Romantic Mann by Jeff MannMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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 as in his poem 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 mountains 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.
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