The Common (Phoenix Poets)

ISBN: 0226514390

Author: Mazur, Gail

Condition: New

Product DescriptionAt the heart of Gail Mazur's The Common is the refusal to simplify what is paradoxical in our world and a recognition of the tensions in our own divided nature. These unflinching poems create a place where wisdom and foolishness, fear and courage, rage and pity, love and diffidence, naturally co-exist.Desire, ambition, devotion, and devastating loss are all subjects for Mazur's clear-eyed poems, which resonate with the contradictions between the body's yearning and the mind's acknowledgment of the consequences of our choices. In a poetry driven by unrelenting questioning, Mazur tries, in Rilke's worlds, "to love the questions themselves."From Publishers WeeklyIn "Traces," Mazur (The Pose of Happiness) reminds herself how crazy she must have been "when I built a home/ over my father's bulldozed house." These two lines sum up her ongoing preoccupations: a sense of place and heritage; death and martyrdom. We travel with her from Boston to Houston to France. Her willingness to voice her imaginings can lead to certain arbitrary considerations; for instance, she superimposes Chernobyl on a boy carrying lilacs or meditates on an organ donor's past life. Her more emotional journeys carry greater weight. Poems about her father are especially poignant. We see him, deceased, taking the lawn mower out at night and cutting the cemetery's grass, or hear him singing with his young child. Mazur's polished craft is frequently more memorable here than any poem's emotional impact.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.Review"Whether telling her students the story of her life, reliving adolescent sex, or confronting her own fears, silliness and ambition, Mazur never gives in to sentiment. Meditative, musical, direct, her poems frequently double back on themselves emotionally in a manner that is simultaneously tender and ironic.... Mazur's is a world of time passing.... Her vision of the world is ultimately one of connection, one in which revelation (and what we are able to say about it) lies in the ordinary, 'not golden, or blazing, but homely.'" - The Women's Review of Books"Forbidden City is a book of wondrous form-finding. These poems are often about art itself, but they have none of the insularity we might associate with 'art for arts sake.' For Mazur, the pursuit of form is not a matter of neglecting emotional, messy content, much less of writing in traditional measures.... Instead, in all their tonal variety, these poems reveal form as a quality that philosophical concepts and good jokes have in common, a logic of simultaneous surprise and inevitability.... Traveling deftly from raw, existential statement to notes on the fridge, Mazurs poems are acts of embodiment, giving shape to experience, including the most painful and most ecstatic, the most monumental and most ordinary. I cant think of another living poet who, while honoring both the need to give shape to life and the inevitability of 'undoing,' has so successfully realized this passion for experience in all its tones and forms." - Provincetown Arts"Mazur's book is in part about all the loves you can't help--and why should you? It's the love of words (and crowded consonants) that lures the speaker down to earth's noisy company from the silence (and long vowels) of solo flight....I love her bargain, which seems to me to represent the bargain that we all must strike between the griefs and desires we feel when we are split by the knowledge we are living and dying. That's what makes our lives guilty--we can't be guided purely by either kind of knowledge.... It's good to be along for the ride with such a driver gripping the wheel for our dear guilty lives." - AgniFrom the Back CoverContinues to tell the passionate truth about herself and life in beautifully made poems. They are the work of a mature, deeply engaged, and productive artist.About the AuthorGail Mazur is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry series and the aut