Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"In this comprehensive volume, Mazur demonstrates a remarkable mastery of poetic technique as she depicts human relationships in all of their ambiguities. . . . Here, as elsewhere, the speaker boldly and sensitively proclaims her own lack of understanding. It is this vulnerability, equipped and complemented with extensive erudition, that makes Mazur’s poems as poignant as they are accomplished in their craft." * Publishers Weekly, Starred Review *
"In her honed and arresting new collection of poetry,
Land’s End, Gail Mazur rightly observes that the sycamores along Memorial Drive in Cambridge do something different than the showy blaze of other trees in fall, 'patterning the road and the old river/with their own kind of darkness and light.' . . . In these new and selected poems, Mazur, who lives in Cambridge and Provincetown, writes with sensual specificity of the Cape, its mussels and sand flats and sandpipers, a hummingbird moth, turnips grown in Eastham, the humble and sublime." -- Nina MacLaughlin * The Boston Globe *
"In
Land’s End, Mazur has done the hard work, building a palette of primal elements, the metaphors of place — gulls, sand, pebbles worn by tides — to express the yearnings of mortality." * Provincetown Independent *
"Before I had received Gail Mazur’s
Land’s End, it had already been praised to me as an artifact, a book that looks and feels handsome. In this day of cookie-cutter template publication and undistinguished design, that’s already a quality to celebrate, and not simply incidental to the poet’s own work." -- Jim Kates * Arts Fuse *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
New PoemsHall Mirror
At 4 A.M.
That Was Then
My American Poem
At Land’s End
Walking Barefoot, August
Thoreauvian
The Conversation
Nostalgia
End of Summer
Eastham Turnips, November
Rest Stop
The Breakwater
*
Josef Albers
The High Line
Snapshots
There Came a Time
Blue Work Shirt
*
Early Morning Walks
More, More
from Forbidden City (2016)Mount Fuji
Forbidden City
My Studio
Believe That Even in My Deliberateness I Was Not Deliberate
*
Shade
Age
On Jane Cooper’s “The Green Notebook”
Philip Guston
The 70s
Elephant Memory
To the Charles River
*
We Swam to an Island of Bees
Instance of Me
The Self in Search of the Sublime
Things
Family Crucible
Grief
from Figures in a Landscape (2011)Figures in a Landscape
Hermit
The Age
Poem
Shipwreck
To the Makers
Borges in Cambridge, 1967
To the Women of My Family
History of My Timidity
Dear Migraine,
Isaac Rosenberg
Inward Conversation
Post-Pastoral
Concordance to a Life’s Work
from Zeppo’s First Wife (2005)Blue Umbrella
The Mission
September
Queenie
Dana Street, December
Zeppo’s First Wife
Seven Sons
Waterlilies
American Ghazal
Rudy’s Tree
from They Can’t Take That Away from Me (2001)Five Poems Entitled “Questions”
Michelangelo: to Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel
Poems
Maybe It’s Only the Monotony
Young Apple Tree, December
I Wish I Want I Need
The Weskit
Evening
Girl in a Library
Air Drawing
from The Common (1995)I’m a Stranger Here Myself
In Houston
Whatever They Want
Bluebonnets
Poem for Christian, My Student
Foliage
Ice
Poem Ending with Three Lines of Wordsworth’s
Bedroom at Arles
from The Pose of Happiness (1986)The Horizontal Man
Jewelweed
Reading Akhmatova
Hurricane Watch
Fallen Angels
Listening to Baseball in the Car
To RTSL, 1985
from Nightfire (1978)Baseball
