"With her fluid yet colloquial line, and her gift of observation, Mazur depicts the mind in all its reflective, reflexive operations. Her poems show how it feels to think, enacting a process of finding and affirming one's own ‘bewildering part in this world.'...[Her poetry] is tough, smart, passionate, and deeply humane."
— Joyce Peseroff, Provincetown Arts

“Colloquial as well as eloquent, pitch-perfect no matter how delicate 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 contemporary life in 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 Judges’ Citation

"[Mazur writes] tough, canny, dangerous poems, full of heart. [She] is a poet not of epiphany or nostalgia but of the telling commonplaces of lives, the odd juncture of greif and desire."
-Don Colburn, The Boston Review


Gail Mazur FAWC


 

 

GAIL MAZUR | A Tribute to James Tate
MassPoetry

GAIL MAZUR | Learn By Going Where We Have to Go: A Poetry Workshop

Fine Arts Work Center
Provincetown, MA

July 12-17, 2015

To write poems is to embark on an ongoing voyage of discovery. During the week of GAIL MAZUR's workshop, you will read bodies of work by four poets, you will write new poems, and discuss participants' poems with an eye to creative revision.

Ploughshares
A Conversation with Gail Mazur
by Sarah Ehrich 
2013

This interview about the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, which will celebrate its fortieth anniversary in 2013, was edited and condensed from a tape recording made as part of the Cambridge Historical Society’s oral history initiative.

read more here

 


Selected Poems

Forbidden City

Figures in a Landscape

Hermit

October

Baseball

Young Apple Tree, December

Blue Umbrella

The Mission

Air Drawing

Whatever They Want

Michaelangelo

 

 
© Mazur