Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems

by Gail Mazur

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.

Widely acclaimed for expanding the stylistic boundaries of both the narrative and meditative lyric, Gail Mazur’s poetry crackles with verbal invention as she confronts the inevitable upheavals of a lived life. Zeppo’s First Wife , which includes excerpts from Mazur’s four previous books, as well as twenty-two new poems, is epitomized by the worldly longing of the title poem, with its searching poignancy and comic bravura. Mazur’s explorations of “this fallen world, this loony world” are deeply moving acts of empathy by a singular moral sensibility—evident from the earliest poem included here, the much-anthologized “Baseball,” a stunning bird’s-eye view of human foibles and passions. Clear-eyed, full of paradoxical griefs and appetites, her poems brave the most urgent subjects—from the fraught luscious Eden of the ballpark, to the fragility of our closest human ties, to the implications for America in a world where power and war are cataclysmic for the strong as well as the weak.

Genres: Poetry

264 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2005

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.”

Reviews

[Vpal23 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've only read a few poems, but Gail Mazur brilliant and quickly becoming one of my favorite poets.