Ben Mazer: Selected Poems

In Ben Mazer's poetry, everything and everyone seems to display a similar quality at moments of heightened, transcendent perception, when the world (or possibly the brain: it's debatable) begins to pulse freely to its inherent musical rhythm, dictating visions and verses. In order to realize its own truth, the present--the place in the moment, with living people in it--must be able to perceive itself (through the poet's mind, whose else?) as a singing, lyric entity that is exactly such as it is because of how the past has mingled with the leaves and the stars and the clouds and the shingle boards of the ancient house of the present--things transient and eternal--as well as with the ghostly presences of the dead and with all that dark and imperfectly understood stuff that that both holds us together and constantly challenges us as a species. The lyric moment is simultaneously musical and paradoxical.

--Philip Nikolayev