Figures in a Landscape

by Gail Mazur

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 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 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.”

Genres: Poetry

89 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2011

About the author

After nearly 13 years of apprenticing herself to poetry, during which she studied with Robert Lowell and immersed herself in the Boston/Cambridge literary scene, Gail Mazur published her first collection, Nightfire (1978), at age 40. Other books include The Pose Of Happiness: Poems (1986); They Can't Take That Away from Me (2001); and Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems (2006). Tess Taylor, interviewing Mazur for the Atlantic Monthly in 2006, described the work in Zeppo’s First Wife as “restless and canny, penned in the voice of a tough-minded, comic speaker who names the minute disconsolations of daily life and then urges herself to engage this named world more wholly or more deeply.”

A graduate of Smith College, Mazur has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Her work has been recognized with a Massachusetts Book Award, and she has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Active in the Boston and Cambridge literary communities, Mazur has served as the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center, and as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

Speaking of the series at Blacksmith House, Mazur explains what has become a mission: “To keep the thing going, to support and validate the work of poets, to make a dent in the isolation writers feel in their working life.”

Reviews

[John Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really lovely collection of poems. My favorite part was the poet's self awareness in the craft and sequencing of the book. She speaks directly to herself intermittently throughout the book; the effect is wholly sincere and inviting. It's a deeply human book.

[Austen to Zafón · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed it, but it didn't knock my socks off. I still plan to check out Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems. I know I've read poems of hers I really liked, but not so many in this book.