“Skeptical yet hopeful, candid yet gentle, clear-eyed but forgiving — Mazur’s poetry achieves these beautiful simultaneities.”
World on a String
by Gail Mazur
“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. World on a String is that magnificent instance of heart, love, intelligence, and language all coming together to make a poetry that is permanently achieved.”
— Tom Sleigh
Gail Mazur
GAIL MAZUR is the author of nine books of poetry, including Nightfire; The Pose of Happiness; The Common, They Can’t Take that Away from Me, finalist for the National Book Award; Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Massachusetts Book Prize and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize; Figures in a Landscape; Forbidden City; Land’s End: New and Selected Poems; and World on a String. Her poems have been widely anthologized, including in several Pushcart Prize anthologies, the Best American Poetry series, and Robert Pinsky’s Essential Pleasures. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Radcliffe Institute. The founding director of The Blacksmith House Poetry Series, she has taught at Boston University, Emerson College, and elsewhere, and served for many years on the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
“What an apt title, World On a String, 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 / the alphabet for what you can find there.’ And what an alphabet she’s found.”
— Andrea Cohen, author of The Sorrow Apartments
