The Common

by Gail Mazur

At the heart of Gail Mazur's The Common is the refusal to simplify what is paradoxical in our world and a recognition of the tensions in our own divided nature. These unflinching poems create a place where wisdom and foolishness, fear and courage, rage and pity, love and diffidence, naturally co-exist.

Desire, ambition, devotion, and devastating loss are all subjects for Mazur's clear-eyed poems, which resonate with the contradictions between the body's yearning and the mind's acknowledgment of the consequences of our choices. In a poetry driven by unrelenting questioning, Mazur tries, in Rilke's worlds, "to love the questions themselves."

Genres: Poetry

81 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1995

About the author

After nearly 13 years of apprenticing herself to poetry, during which she studied with Robert Lowell and immersed herself in the Boston/Cambridge literary scene, Gail Mazur published her first collection, Nightfire (1978), at age 40. Other books include The Pose Of Happiness: Poems (1986); They Can't Take That Away from Me (2001); and Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems (2006). Tess Taylor, interviewing Mazur for the Atlantic Monthly in 2006, described the work in Zeppo’s First Wife as “restless and canny, penned in the voice of a tough-minded, comic speaker who names the minute disconsolations of daily life and then urges herself to engage this named world more wholly or more deeply.”

A graduate of Smith College, Mazur has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Her work has been recognized with a Massachusetts Book Award, and she has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Active in the Boston and Cambridge literary communities, Mazur has served as the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center, and as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

Speaking of the series at Blacksmith House, Mazur explains what has become a mission: “To keep the thing going, to support and validate the work of poets, to make a dent in the isolation writers feel in their working life.”