The Common

by Mazur, Gail

• ISBN13: 9780226514390
• ISBN10: 0226514390
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-04-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

At the heart of Gail Mazur'sThe Commonis 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."

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Two Worlds: A Bridge

The Acorn I'm a Stranger

Here Myself Mensch in the Morning

In Houston Whatever

They Want Desire Bedroom at Arles

Poem for Christian, My Student May, Home after a Year

Away Bluebonnets Fracture Santa Monica

The Idea of Florida During a Winter

Thaw Snake in the Grass Blue

Why You Travel After the Storm, August

A Green Watering Can Maternal

Ware's Cove Ice Traces Phonic

Pennies from Heaven Another

Tree Revenant Yahrzeit Family Plot Foliage

The Common At Boston Garden, the First Night of War, 1991

Poem Ending with Three Lines of Wordsworth's Lilacs on Brattle Street

A Small Plane from Boston to Montpelier

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