They Can't Take That Away from Me

by Mazur, Gail

• ISBN13: 9780226514444
• ISBN10: 0226514447
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

In this series of new poems Gail Mazur takes stock-of the complexity of relationships between parents and children, the desires of the body as well as its frailties, the distinctions between memory and history, and the hope of art to capture these seemingly inscrutable realities. By turns mordant and passionate, narrative and meditative, Mazur's poems imply that life, with all of its losses, triumphs, and abrasive intimacies, is far richer and more elaborately metaphorical than poetry can aspire to be-and yet her poems do affectingly recreate this reality. These illuminating poems are the work of an acclaimed poet at the top of her form.

Author Biography

Gail Mazur is the author of Nightfire, The Pose of Happiness, and The Common, the last published by the University of Chicago Press. She is founder and director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches in Emerson College's Graduate Program in Writing, Literature and Publishing. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Five Poems Entitled ``Questions''	3	(10)
Maybe It's Only the Monotony	13	(26)
Not Crying	14	(2)
Evening	16	(2)
I Wish I Want I Need	18	(4)
Young Apple Tree, December	22	(2)
The Weskit	24	(4)
Penumbra	28	(2)
Last Night	30	(2)
My Dream after Mother Breaks Her Hip	32	(2)
They Can't Take That Away from Me	34	(5)
Hypnosis	39	(22)
At the Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic	41	(6)
Girl in a Library	47	(3)
Twenty Lines before Breakfast	50	(1)
Wakeful before Tests	51	(3)
Shangri-la	54	(1)
Two Bedrooms	55	(6)
Poems	61	(4)
Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel (translation)	62	(3)
Air Drawing	65	(2)
Leah's Dream	67	(2)
Then	69	(1)
Right Now	70	(1)
Keep Going	71	(4)
The Beach	75	(1)
Low Tide	76	(2)
To Begin This Way Every Day	78	(2)
Three Provincetown Mornings	80	(3)
Insomnia at Daybreak	83