Figures in a Landscape
Figures in a Landscape
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 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 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.”
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Table of Contents
One
Hermit
Poem
The Age
The Island
To the Makers
Shipwreck
While You Were Out
Late September
October
Notes in Chalk on a Ruined Bridge
Figures in a Landscape
Two
History of My Timidity
Dear Migraine,
Asymmetrical Millay November
To the Women of My Family
Another Form
In Another Country
Post-Pastoral
Autobiographia Misereria
Inward Conversation
Three
Wedding Album
Borges in Cambridge, 1967
American Scene, 1935
Isaac Rosenberg
F & the Interpretation of Dreams
Little Tempest
10,000 Days
Concordance to a Life’s Work
Daisy, Daisy
Poem at the End of August