As I got to know him I discovered that poetry was not something he did in his spare time, it was already his life’s vocation. While I was an averagely hedonistic, disorganised undergraduate, he had already embraced a strict work ethic to which he stuck for the rest of his life. He rose early, his mornings were sacrosanct, devoted to his writing. I sometimes thought that if our ancient fire trap of a college staircase caught fire Chris would rather continue his hunt for that elusive word or rhyme than grab a fire extinguisher, or even try to escape. 

I remember once taking him to my hometown in England, where I had the use of a sailing dinghy. The morning was perfect for sailing and I suggested we leave right away or we would miss the favourable tide. He looked at me as if I had suggested we rob a bank. “I’m sorry, I’m working on something,” he said. “Could it wait till this afternoon?” In vain did I protest that time and tide wait for no man. Not even for Chris Mann the Poet.

Even in later life, when he had developed a strongly Christian outlook, he was seldom able to attend morning services. He worked through family holidays, Sundays, Christmas Day, on the morning of a friend’s funeral, even his own wedding day. 

He loved his time at Oxford – the buildings, traditions, the company of learned teachers and students, the opportunity to immerse himself in the literature of the entire world, from Homer and Dante, George Herbert, Donne, his beloved Keats, Blake, Hopkins, Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost to the present. The list is deliberate: these were his most important influences, reaching for the divine through imagery drawn from the ordinary, the natural world and the cosmos. When, in his final year he was awarded the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, (previous winners included Ruskin, Arnold, Wilde, Huxley), he could believe his own work had achieved acceptance and he had found his spiritual home.

As students, talking late into the night, I found it disconcerting that he seemed to be taking mental notes. One risk of being Chris’ friend was that you might later appear in one of his poems. As a poet he was never off duty; he was interested in everyone and everything. He was always watching, listening, observing, trying to understand. He always had a poem on the go, waiting to be born. 

He saw it as his mission to use the power, precision and economy of poetry to reveal the world in all its banality, horror, glory, or mystery: a row of potatoes (“their offspring/like thumb-sized moles/suckle in a womb of earth/a tangle of strings”); the State murder of his friend Jeanette Schoon in Angola (“But language … can only gesture, patchily at a/room in shambles, the rafters smoking, freak-/mangled chairs, the hair-tufts, flesh/-bits, your infant’s …”); a dragonfly on a hot rock by the Zambezi (“Your lineage is as old as coal,/your life in the swirl of stars,/a twitch of plasma on a reed”); Christianity and faith (“I saw – sailing through the morning mist/as if through time, your long-hulled ship of stone./That’s when I knew my sturdiest gift for you/would be to raise, in phrase on measured phrase/the small cathedral of a faith-built poem,/made in and out of words, and love, in time”); and on love and family (“And when, growing wiser/you see our imperfections/the frail glasswork of our dreams/remember this: the night/the stars, this blue-quilted bed/were wondrous to your parents./You were conceived in love”).