{"title":"Gail Mazur","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"forbidden-city","title":"Forbidden City","description":"\u003ci\u003efrom \"Mount Fuji\"\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e A draughtsman's draughtsman, Hokusai at 70\u003cbr\u003e thought he'd begun to grasp the structures \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way\u003cbr\u003e plants grow, hoped that by 90 he'd have\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003epenetrated to their essential nature\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e And more, by 100, \u003ci\u003eI will have reached the stage\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003ewhere every dot, every mark I make will be\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003ealive.\u003c\/i\u003e You always loved that resolve, you'd repeat \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e joyfully-Hokusai's utterance of faith\u003cbr\u003e in work's possibilities, its reward, that, \u003cbr\u003e at 130, he'd perhaps have learned to draw. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Gail Mazur's poems in \u003ci\u003eForbidden City\u003c\/i\u003e 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.","brand":"Gail Mazur","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43805971742762,"sku":"9780226349565","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/forbidden-city-1226956.jpg?v=1762481022"},{"product_id":"world-on-a-string","title":"World On a String","description":"\u003cp\u003eA new book of poetry by Cambridge legend Gail Mazur.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"What an apt title, \u003cem\u003eWorld On a String\u003c\/em\u003e, for poems that speak to the tethering and tenuousness this life is. Mazur writes: 'Go, sit in the woods, ' I said to myself \/ in the middle of my life, 'and learn \/ \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e the alphabet for what you can find there.' And what an alphabet \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e she's found.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e- Andrea Cohen\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Skeptical yet hopeful, candid yet gentle, clear-eyed but forgiving -Mazur's poetry achieves these beautiful simultaneities.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e- Mark Halliday\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"When I read Gail Mazur's polished-but-not-too-polished genius for the way the lyrical and the historical interpenetrate, I know I'm in the presence of one of the rarest, strangest, most quietly original sensibilities that I've ever read. Full of gravitas, sly humor, and a gift for telling the truth all the way to the bottom, her poems, in Seamus Heaney's words, 'are steeped in luck': the luck of knowing how to conjure gone worlds without strain, of feeling with great accuracy and no noisy rhetoric what Lowell aspired to - to be heartbreaking. But the 'funerals' in Mazur's brain are never just funereal or elegiac grandstanding, but astonishing acts of linguistic virtuosity, seemingly plain-style but so quietly eloquent and luminous that they overbear loss, identity, even the atrocities of history itself. \u003cem\u003eWorld on a String\u003c\/em\u003e is that magnificent instance of heart, love, intelligence, and language all coming together to make a poetry that is permanently achieved.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e-- Tom Sleigh\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gail Mazur","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43805971841066,"sku":"9798991525442","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/world-on-a-string-3987715.jpg?v=1762481021"},{"product_id":"figures-in-a-landscape","title":"Figures in a Landscape","description":"\u003cp\u003eA 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 \u003ci\u003eFigures in a Landscape\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gail Mazur","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43805971972138,"sku":"9780226514413","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/figures-in-a-landscape-2842771.jpg?v=1762481021"}],"url":"https:\/\/thepoetryshop.com\/collections\/gail-mazur.oembed","provider":"The Poetry Shop LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}