Zeppo’s First Wife
New and Selected Poems
9780226514475
9780226514505
Zeppo’s First Wife
New and Selected Poems
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 sensibility—evident 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 subjects—from 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.
. . . 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 sensibility—evident 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 subjects—from 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.
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
New Poems
Enormously Sad
Blue Umbrella
American Ghazal
Acadia
At First, They
Queenie
Dana Street, December
The Swamp Trail
Now:
The Mission
Cape Air
Cemetery Road
Night Visitation
September
Black Ducks
A Small Door
To Whoever May Be Concerned:
Rudy’s Tree
To X
Seven Sons
Waterlilies
Zeppo’s First Wife
They Can’t Take That Away From Me (2001)
Five Poems Entitled "Questions"
Maybe It’s Only the Monotony
Not Crying
Evening
I Wish I Want I Need
Young Apple Tree, December
The Weskit
Penumbra
Last Night
My Dream After Mother Breaks Her Hip
They Can’t Take That Away from Me
Hypnosis
At the Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic
Girl in a Library
Twenty Lines before Breakfast
Wakeful before Tests
Shangri-la
Two Bedrooms
Poems
Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel
Air Drawing
Leah’s Dream
Then
Right Now
Keep Going
The Beach
Low Tide
To Begin This Way Every Day
Three Provincetown Mornings
Insomnia at Daybreak
The Common (1995)
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
From The Pose of Happiness (1986)
Mashpee, 1979
Mashpee, 1952
After the Fire
Ruins
Mashpee Wine
Reading Akhmatova
Next Door
Fallen Angels
In the Dark Our Story
In the Garment District
A Deck of Cards
Teeth
Being Sick
Elementary Education
The Horizontal Man
Jewelweed
Pears
Early Winter
Anomie
Norumbega Park
Daylight
Hurricane Watch
Dog Days, Sweet Everlasting
Longfellow Park, August
Dutch Tulips
Listening to Baseball in the Car
Two Months in the Country
Graves
Afterward
To RTSL, 1985
Spring Planting
From Nightfire (1978)
Baseball
New Poems
Enormously Sad
Blue Umbrella
American Ghazal
Acadia
At First, They
Queenie
Dana Street, December
The Swamp Trail
Now:
The Mission
Cape Air
Cemetery Road
Night Visitation
September
Black Ducks
A Small Door
To Whoever May Be Concerned:
Rudy’s Tree
To X
Seven Sons
Waterlilies
Zeppo’s First Wife
They Can’t Take That Away From Me (2001)
Five Poems Entitled "Questions"
Maybe It’s Only the Monotony
Not Crying
Evening
I Wish I Want I Need
Young Apple Tree, December
The Weskit
Penumbra
Last Night
My Dream After Mother Breaks Her Hip
They Can’t Take That Away from Me
Hypnosis
At the Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic
Girl in a Library
Twenty Lines before Breakfast
Wakeful before Tests
Shangri-la
Two Bedrooms
Poems
Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel
Air Drawing
Leah’s Dream
Then
Right Now
Keep Going
The Beach
Low Tide
To Begin This Way Every Day
Three Provincetown Mornings
Insomnia at Daybreak
The Common (1995)
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
From The Pose of Happiness (1986)
Mashpee, 1979
Mashpee, 1952
After the Fire
Ruins
Mashpee Wine
Reading Akhmatova
Next Door
Fallen Angels
In the Dark Our Story
In the Garment District
A Deck of Cards
Teeth
Being Sick
Elementary Education
The Horizontal Man
Jewelweed
Pears
Early Winter
Anomie
Norumbega Park
Daylight
Hurricane Watch
Dog Days, Sweet Everlasting
Longfellow Park, August
Dutch Tulips
Listening to Baseball in the Car
Two Months in the Country
Graves
Afterward
To RTSL, 1985
Spring Planting
From Nightfire (1978)
Baseball
Awards
Massachusetts Center for the Book: Mass Book Awards
Won
The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College: Paterson Poetry Prize
Shortlist
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