Based on bingos recommendation, I tried CPAN::Easy. It's built on top of CPAN::DistnameInfo, and it's fast. It will also fetch the tarball for you, if you want.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use CPAN::Easy;
use Data::Dumper::Concise;

my(@mods) = (
    'Time::Piece',
    'Pod::Simple',
    'Math::BigInt'
);
       
foreach my $mod(@mods) {
my($info) = CPAN::Easy->get_info($mod);
        print Dumper($info);
}
[download]