Figures
in a Landscape
A
book of Gail Mazur's most recent poems
was published in 2011.
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.”
University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226514413