Zeppo's First Wife

by Mazur, Gail

• ISBN13: 9780226514475
• ISBN10: 0226514471
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

from Enormously Sad . . . Sad, so sad-compared to what? To your earlier more oblivious state? It never was oblivious enough- always those presentiments of sadness prickling the limbic. Now a voice says, Get outside yourself, go walk on the flats. The tide's gone out but your little metal detector will detect little metallic coins of enormous sadness in the teeming wet sand, and then, the tide will come back, erasing, cleansing! And you, standing there in the salty scouring air- will you still be enormously sad, While the other world, outside your tiny purview, struck by iron, reels? World of intentional iron, pure savage organized iron of the world, it hasn't the time that you have for your puny enormous sadness. 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 sensibilityevident 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 subjectsfrom 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.

Author Biography

Gail Mazur's most recent book, They Can't Take That Away from Me, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. She is Distinguished Writer in Residence in Emerson College's Writing, Literature and Publishing Program, and lives in Provincetown and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, as well as the St. Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Now Poems
Enormously Sad	3	(2)
Blue Umbrella	5	(2)
American Ghazal	7	(2)
Acadia	9	(2)
At First, They	11	(2)
Queenie	13	(2)
Dana Street, December	15	(3)
The Swamp Trail	18	(2)
Now	20	(2)
The Mission	22	(2)
Cape Air	24	(2)
Cemetery Road	26	(2)
Night Visitation	28	(2)
September	30	(1)
Black Ducks	31	(2)
A Small Door	33	(2)
To Whoever May Be Concerned	35	(2)
Rudy's Tree	37	(2)
To X	39	(1)
Seven Sons	40	(3)
Waterlilies	43	(2)
Zeppo's First Wife	45	(8)
THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME (2001)
Five Poems Entitled ``Questions''	53	(10)
Maybe It's Only the Monotony	63	(1)
Not Crying	64	(2)
Evening	66	(2)
I Wish I Want I Need	68	(4)
Young Apple Tree, December	72	(2)
The Weskit	74	(5)
Penumbra	79	(3)
Last Night	82	(3)
My Dream After Mother Breaks Her Hip	85	(2)
They Can't Take That Away from Me	87	(4)
Hypnosis	91	(2)
At the Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic	93	(7)
Girl in a Library	100	(3)
Twenty Lines before Breakfast	103	(1)
Wakeful before Tests	104	(3)
Shangri-la	107	(2)
Two Bedrooms	109	(6)
Poems	115	(1)
Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel	116	(5)
Air Drawing	121	(2)
Leah's Dream	123	(2)
Then	125	(1)
Right Now	126	(1)
Keep Going	127	(4)
The Beach	131	(2)
Low Tide	133	(2)
To Begin This Way Every Day	135	(2)
Three Provincetown Mornings	137	(3)
Insomnia at Daybreak	140	(3)
THE COMMON (1995)
Two Worlds: A Bridge	143	(4)
The Acorn	147	(1)
I'm a Stranger Here Myself	148	(2)
Mensch in the Morning	150	(2)
In Houston	152	(3)
Whatever They Want	155	(2)
Desire	157	(2)
Bedroom at Arles	159	(2)
Poem for Christian, My Student	161	(2)
May, Home after a Year Away	163	(4)
Bluebonnets	167	(2)
Fracture Santa Monica	169	(2)
The Idea of Florida during a Winter Thaw	171	(2)
Snake in the Grass	173	(2)
Blue	175	(2)
Why You Travel	177	(2)
After the Storm, August	179	(4)
A Green Watering Can	183	(2)
Maternal	185	(2)
Ware's Cove	187	(2)
Ice	189	(2)
Traces	191	(2)
Phonic	193	(2)
Pennies from Heaven	195	(2)
Another Tree	197	(2)
Revenant	199	(1)
Yahrzeit	200	(2)
Family Plot	202	(5)
Foliage	207	(1)
The Common	208	(2)
At Boston Garden, the First Night of War, 1991	210	(2)
Poem Ending with Three Lines of Wordsworth's	212	(3)
Lilacs on Brattle Street	215	(2)
A Small Plane from Boston to Montpelier	217	(4)
From THE POSE OF HAPPINESS (1986)
Mashpee, 1979	221	(2)
Mashpee, 1952	223	(2)
After the Fire	225	(2)
Ruins	227	(2)
Mashpee Wine	229	(3)
Reading Akhmatova	232	(2)
Next Door	234	(2)
Fallen Angels	236	(3)
In the Dark Our Story	239	(3)
In the Garment District	242	(2)
A Deck of Cards	244	(3)
Teeth	247	(3)
Being Sick	250	(2)
Elementary Education	252	(2)
The Horizontal Man	254	(3)
Jewelweed	257	(2)
Pears	259	(2)
Early Winter	261	(2)
Anomie	263	(2)
Norumbega Park	265	(2)
Daylight	267	(2)
Hurricane Watch	269	(2)
Dog Days, Sweet Everlasting	271	(2)
Longfellow Park, August	273	(2)
Dutch Tulips	275	(2)
Listening to Baseball in the Car	277	(2)
Two Months in the Country	279	(3)
Graves	282	(4)
Afterward	286	(2)
To RTSL, 1985	288	(1)
Spring Planting	289	(4)
From NIGHTFIRE (1978)
Baseball	293