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.”

Gail Mazur is a poet of erasures and the fragments that remain. In a language both musical and meditative, she writes with compassion for mortal frailties. I admire the stoicism at the heart of Mazur’s vision, her willingness to gaze into the darkness and speak. This resilience in the face of worry and fear gives her work its fine poignancy. Generous, thoughtful, moral without being moralistic, the poems become that shared, public space in which we recognize the intersections of disparate histories and the singular nature of the everyday: The Common.

—Alice Fulton

In her new book of poems, The Common, Gail Mazur continues to tell the passionate truth about herself and life in beautifully made poems. They are the work of a mature, deeply engaged, and productive artist.

—Alan Dugan

Gail Mazur writes in The Common about the “inexhaustible reality” of her life in America, touching “things about to vanish.” Her masterful poems are both sad and witty—is there better praise?

—Adam Zagajewski