- Hardcover: 264 pages
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press (17 Feb 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0226514471
- ISBN-13: 978-0226514475
- Product Dimensions: 22.5 x 16.1 x 2.4 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 5,332,954 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems (Phoenix Poets)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"Colloquial as well as eloquent, pitch perfect no matter how difficult her material, Gail Mazur has found a way to write that is completely responsive to her remarkable qualities of mind. She gives us the exact feel of our disquieting republic, the uncanny way in which love, hope, and endurance are shot through by contingency, dread, and estrangement. Full of warmth, humor and a dry-eyed toughness, her work is a superb personal and civic achievement." - National Book Award 2001 jury citation"
Product Description
From Enormously Sad...Sad, so sad - compared to what? To your earlier more oblivious state? It never was oblivious enough - always those presentiments of sadness prickling the limbic. Now a voice says, Get outside yourself, go walk on the flats. The tide's gone out - but your little metal detector will detect little metallic coins of enormous sadness in the teeming wet sand, and then, the tide will come back, erasing, cleansing! And you, standing there in the salty scouring air - will you still be enormously sad, While the other world, outside your tiny purview, struck by iron, reels? World of intentional iron, pure savage organized iron of the world, it hasn't the time that you have for your puny enormous sadness. Gail Mazur's mastery of narrative and meditative verse pervades "Zeppo's First Wife", which includes twenty-two new poems as well as excerpts from all of Mazur's four previous books. Epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem, with its comic bravura and underlying poignancy, the new poems resonate throughout the collection, particularly with the earliest poem included here, the much-anthologized "Baseball," a stunning bird's-eye view of human foibles and passions. Her poems, deeply moving acts of empathy, give the feel of contemporary life, full of paradoxical griefs and desires - from the fraught, luscious Eden of the baseball park and the fragility of our closest human ties to the moral implications for America in a world where power and wars are cataclysmic for the weak as well as the strong. Pushing the stylistic envelope of the contemporary meditative lyric, Mazur's poetry crackles with linguistic invention, enacting the process of coming to terms with difficulty - a task she executes on behalf of us all with rare imagination, wit, and intelligence.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
A RICH AND GENEROUS GIFT
2 Nov 2006
Format:Hardcover
Zeppo's First Wife--eloquent, warm, urgent, funny--is a generous gift, offering several books in one: the complete text of the National Book Award finalist You Can't Take That Away from Me (2001), the complete text of The Common (1995), and a selection of both new and earlier poems that make this an especially rich "new and selected." The work arranges the books in reverse chronological order, ending with only one poem--the much-anthologized "Baseball"--from Mazur's first collection. The result is hauntingly like watching a film of the poet's life and mind rewind, as figures grieved in the more recent poems appear in earlier ones, and as the profoundly mature poet reveals the earlier excursions of her careful observations and probing mind. With unfailingly sure music and complex yet clear syntax, Mazur takes on the most deeply disturbing emotions ("I'm afraid of grief, and I mean to enter it fully"), questioning, exploring, refusing the solace of art or easy answers as she chronicles a quickly disappearing present and follows memory into a vividly detailed past. If reading Gail Mazur's poetry doesn't change your life, it may change the way you look at the world and think about your experiences.
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