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Winner of the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry
Passaic
County Community College: Paterson Poetry Prize
Short Listed/Finalist Apr 6, 2006
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.
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"Imagine the audacity to entitle a new collection of poems
Zeppo's First Wife! Defying humdrum ideas of what is poetic, Gail
Mazur's title is too anti-lyrical for any old-fashioned notion of
poetry. Yet its comedy is not merely wise-guy or superior in the
glib manner sometimes called post-modernist. Here the element of
tribute is real and sincere."
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—Robert Pinsky, The
Washington Post
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"From
the new poems in Zeppo’s First Wife one can watch the growth
of an elegist of the first order. Grief’s abrasions on the soul,
however, form only part of the story. As with all great elegies, Mazur’s
expand her own sense of what it means to be alive, and this is true
for the reader as well. We are often, in her poetry, put in the position
of those left behind, and we too are required to make room for loss,
absence and fracture…. Yet such attention constitutes Mazur’s
affirmation of life, including its pain. (Her) tone is neither naïve
nor doomed--instead, she sounds the grace notes of survivor knowledge…."
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—Fred
Marchant, Provincetown
Arts
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"Gail Mazur's poems articulate the ruminative, careful, attuned
reflections of maturity, with its attendant wisdom, regret, and acceptance.
Beautifully constructed, immediately absorbing, and prosaic in the
most positive sense, they eschew verbal high jinks for clear-mindedness
and make for deeply pleasurable reading."
—Tina Barr, Harvard Review
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