Theatre of Quotation and Gesture

But soft, the story starts anew.

It is the last line of the last poem in Randall Mann's Breakfast with Thom Gunn. And its somewhat Shakespearean tone befits the poem "Fictions" which it concludes for it combines a lullaby sentiment with sad intimations of mortality (this is after all a poem that begins "For years, there was no hope. We had grown up / believing the dead, while dead / might stay a while."

In a similar gesture, Mann concludes an earlier collection (Complaint in the Garden) with a poem entitled "The End of the Last Summer" with lines that invoke the spirit of the dead ("The peninsula grows dark; / the dead stay dead. / The sea is rising ... and the world is sand.") — a poem whose last line is a quotation from a concluding line of a poem by Wilfred Owen (and so we are informed by the last text of the book - a note to this effect).

Starting anew ... the world is sand .. and so dream . again

And so for day 1137
23.01.2010