in reply to Catalyst? Poet? mod_perl?

Mason2 and Poet are from the same author and are meant to go together. Since you have experience with Mason version 1, Mason2 seems like a good bet. It has extensive documentation too.

Anyway, nowadays, you're supposed to use PSGI (or other fastcgi connector) rather than mod_perl to connect to Apache. I'm sure the documentation for whichever framework you choose covers how to do that.