A new book of poetry by Cambridge legend Gail Mazur.
"What an apt title,
World On a String
, for poems that speak to the tethering and tenuousness this life is. Mazur writes: 'Go, sit in the woods, ' I said to myself / in the middle of my life, 'and learn / the alphabet for what you can find there.' And what an alphabet she's found."
- Andrea Cohen
"Skeptical yet hopeful, candid yet gentle, clear-eyed but forgiving -Mazur's poetry achieves these beautiful simultaneities."
- Mark Halliday
"When I read Gail Mazur's polished-but-not-too-polished genius for the way the lyrical and the historical interpenetrate, I know I'm in the presence of one of the rarest, strangest, most quietly original sensibilities that I've ever read. Full of gravitas, sly humor, and a gift for telling the truth all the way to the bottom, her poems, in Seamus Heaney's words, 'are steeped in luck': the luck of knowing how to conjure gone worlds without strain, of feeling with great accuracy and no noisy rhetoric what Lowell aspired to - to be heartbreaking. But the 'funerals' in Mazur's brain are never just funereal or elegiac grandstanding, but astonishing acts of linguistic virtuosity, seemingly plain-style but so quietly eloquent and luminous that they overbear loss, identity, even the atrocities of history itself.
World on a String
is that magnificent instance of heart, love, intelligence, and language all coming together to make a poetry that is permanently achieved."
-- Tom Sleigh