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Bones Washed with Wine

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This book is a collection of poems in which the poet runs alternately toward and away from love. His peregrinations take him to Brighton, the British Museum, Buchenwald, Walden Pond, the grave of Alexander the Great's father in Thessaloniki, and Civil War battle sights. In addition to the reader, his traveling companions include Heathcliff, Emily Dickinson, Edward II, and the Gray Lady. Like the rest of us, he is driven by love. Who wouldn't want to get the following lines from an absent lover?: "Whenever you enter my sight, my arms, / summer saturates us, evolution accelerates, / nakedness riling with honey and sunlight. / No sense of mine, made modest by loneliness, / ever dreamed such surpassing. Only you ever / made my love welcome, could face half my fire." A strong poet understand that nothing is so ordinary it cannot add a piece to the puzzle of who he is. He is then bound, as a poet, to report it honestly, straightforwardly to all within earshot. Mann is a strong poet.