Forbidden City (Phoenix Poets)

Forbidden City (Phoenix Poets)

from “Mount Fuji” A draughtsman’s draughtsman, Hokusai at 70 thought he’d begun to grasp the structures   of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way plants grow, hoped that by 90 he’d have penetrated to their essential nature .   And more, by 100, I will have reached the stage where every dot, every mark I make will be alive. You always loved that resolve, you’d repeat   joyfully—Hokusai’s utterance of faith in work’s possibilities, its reward, that, at 130, he’d perhaps have learned to draw.   Gail Mazur’s poems in Forbidden City  build an engaging meditative structure upon the elements of mortality and art, eloquently contemplating the relationship of art and life—and the dynamic possibilities of each in combination. At the collection’s heart is the poet’s long marriage to the artist Michael Mazur (1935–2009). A fascinating range of tone infuses the book—grieving, but clear-eyed rather than lugubrious, sometimes whimsical, even comical, and often exuberant. The note of pleasure, as in an old tradition enriched by transience, runs through the work, even in the final poem, “Grief,” where “our ravenous hold on the world” is a powerful central element. “Powerful. . . . Mazur’s poems register the constant tug between holding on and letting go that is an inescapable condition of her life: she is always bumping up against a glimmer from the past or the future, even as she goes through each day.” ― Hyperallergic “Mazur examines her response to desolation with unsparing meticulousness. The results are poems that expand our understanding of the consolation of nature, the miracles of art, and the power of imagination. . . . In its passion and invention, line by line, Forbidden City reveals Gail Mazur as an artist writing at the height of her powers.”  ― On the Seawall “No one—and I mean no one— writes poems as chock full of such nuanced feeling as Gail Mazur. She is as good as it gets. Has the elegiac ever seemed so vibrant and full of breathing space as it does here? The poems in Forbidden City run light and true under hard losses. They are heroic in the best possible way, fully open to sorrow and fear but keeping their wits about them at all times. I love them, and envy their generous powers.” -- David Rivard “With courageous disinterestedness, Mazur turns private particulars into universal images with a light poetic touch. We feel what she feels in the most ordinary objects and images that shine as human touchstones for our common longings and laments."   ― Harvard Review Online Gail Mazur is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry series and the author of six previous books of poems, including They Can’t Take That Away from Me , a finalist for the National Book Award. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Insitute of Radcliffe College as well as the St. Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award.