Search results for ""author gail mazur""

With her latest poetry collection, Gail Mazur once again shows her mastery of the descriptive-meditative narrative, powerfully evoking the past while writing from the firm ground of the present. In Land's End, we see Mazur writing with the kind of lyric authority, ever-deepening emotional range, and intellectual and social scope that her readers have come to expect in her poetry. Beautifully crafted elegies meet with reflections on her own life, her family, and artists who have come and gone. In the title poem, she leads readers through a garden, where new and old growth twists together in an "almanac of inheritances" that conjures the rich memory of poets who have passed on. In this space of remembrance, Mazur also charges us with the responsibility of nurturing art and artists of the future, especially in the face of the disheartening absurdities of contemporary politics. Contemplating the growth and decay so entwined in life, these poems invite us to consider both inevitable brokenness and necessary hope, writing "My work now: to continue learning to absorb the loss, / and live." Through tidal creeks and the weightless scenes of ukiyo-e woodcuts, in artists' studios and along the frozen Charles River, Mazur connects passionately with the world around her. Carrying with her the undeniable presence of loss and of time past, she engages deeply with the present, her historic memory informing a deep concern for contemporary life. Reading Land's End, we find ourselves with the poet: as if here at land's end, here on the coast, urgent, together we'd have energies to do battle forever. As if we could rescue the guttering world....

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'Late September': Now, from the sweet fragrance of roses, bitterness stings our nostrils. The bay's withdrawn from us, the beach is littered with broken things - splintered oars, bits of old clay pipe from a long ago shipwreck, fragments of china plates. Enchanting, those days my townspeople scavenged rare cargo, furnishing their long winters with random wares. Now, the wind from two directions turns soft dubious summer to a hard estate. Now, when we know death is near, we walk with more courage, but slowly, alongside cavorting dogs. And soon he and I will wade together into the cold homecoming wave. A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur's recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be exposed to, the profound underlying subject of this book: a husband's approaching death. The intimate particulars of a shared life are seen from a great height - and then there's the underlife of the bunker: endurance, holding on, life as uncompromising reality. This new work, possessed by the unique devil-may-care intensity of someone writing at the end of her nerves, makes "Figures in a Landscape" feel radiant, visionary, and exhilarating, rather than elegiac. Mazur's masterly fusion of abstraction with the facts of a life creates a coming to terms with what Yeats called 'the aboriginal ice.'

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from “Mount Fuji” A draughtsman’s draughtsman, Hokusai at 70 thought he’d begun to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way plants grow, hoped that by 90 he’d havepenetrated to their essential nature. And more, by 100, I will have reached the stagewhere every dot, every mark I make will bealive. You always loved that resolve, you’d repeat joyfully—Hokusai’s utterance of faith in work’s possibilities, its reward, that, at 130, he’d perhaps have learned to draw. Gail Mazur’s poems in Forbidden City build an engaging meditative structure upon the elements of mortality and art, eloquently contemplating the relationship of art and life—and the dynamic possibilities of each in combination. At the collection’s heart is the poet’s long marriage to the artist Michael Mazur (1935–2009). A fascinating range of tone infuses the book—grieving, but clear-eyed rather than lugubrious, sometimes whimsical, even comical, and often exuberant. The note of pleasure, as in an old tradition enriched by transience, runs through the work, even in the final poem, “Grief,” where “our ravenous hold on the world” is a powerful central element.

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