At the heart of Gail Mazur's The Common is 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."
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
