by Fred Marchant, Provincetown Arts, 2006

“A ‘new and selected’ collection of poetry affords the reader many pleasures a single volume of poetry rarely does. Looming large among these is the chance to track the writer’s growth as an artist. And, because of the broader canvas, one might get from a “new and selected” group of poems a firmer sense of the writer’s preoccupations in theme and subject matter. Probably the greatest pleasure, however, is the chance to pin down what has drawn one to the work time and again. This became apparent to me as I read the nearly three hundred pages of Zeppo’s First Wife by Gail Mazur, a ‘new and selected’ collection that gathers twenty-two new poems and a very generous selection from Ms. Mazur’s four previous books. Judging by my marginal notes and underlining, I am invariably taken by the exquisitely crafted endings of her poems. Book by book, year after year, her poems startle and move the reader with their capacity to end on a note that belongs to her and no one else. Gail Mazur, it seems, is a master of poetic closure. . . . I think the endings of Gail Mazur’s poems, no matter how sad, frightened, or perplexed, offer us a luminous quality . . . a quality that marks these new and selected poems from beginning to end.”