Mazur, Gail 1937–

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Mazur, Gail 1937–

PERSONAL:

Born November 10, 1937, in Cambridge, MA; daughter of Manuel (in antiques business) and Mildred (a teacher) Beckwith; married Michael Mazur (an artist), December 28, 1958; children: Daniel Isaac, Kathe Elizabeth. Education: Smith College, B.A., 1959; studied with Robert Lowell, 1975-77.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Cambridge, MA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Cambridge, MA, instructor in poetry, 1973-2002. Founder and director of Blacksmith House poetry program, beginning 1973, editor for Blacksmith Press, beginning 1974. Emerson College, Boston, MA, poet-in-residence, 1979-80; Lesley College, Cambridge, MA, mentor, 1983-84; University of Massachusetts—Boston, faculty member, 1985, 1991. Member of board of directors of "Book Affair"; has given readings from her works throughout New England and the Tennessee poetry circuit, and served as juror for poetry competitions.

MEMBER:

Poetry Society of America.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellowship for Ossabaw Island, 1975; National Endowment for the Arts fellow, 1978; They Can't Take That away from Me was nominated for a National Book Award, 2001; Distinguished Artist Award, St. Botolph Club Foundation, 2005.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Nightfire, David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1978.

The Pose of Happiness, David R. Godine (Boston, MA), 1986.

The Common, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1995.

They Can't Take That away from Me, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2001.

Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2007.

Work anthologized in Blacksmith Anthologies; Io Anthology; and Baseball, I Gave You the Best Years of My Life. Contributor to literary periodicals, including Antioch Review, Nantucket Review, Ploughshares, and Sun.

SIDELIGHTS:

Poet Gail Mazur is known for her attention to craft and for her ability to see beauty, humor, and endless fascination in the things of ordinary life. Her poems address such mundane subjects as baseball, adolescent love, learning to drive, and chance conversations, as well as the deeper and universal themes of family relationships, exile, mutability, and loss. In a review of Mazur's third collection, The Common, a writer for Publishers Weekly considered Mazur's poems about her father—which show him, after his death, cutting the grass at the cemetery or singing with the poet as a child—as among the collection's most poignant. Women's Review of Books contributor Alison Townsend observed that "Mazur writes elegantly and eloquently of exile—both geographic and psychological—and its effects on a life" without "giv[ing] in to sentiment." As Townsend described them, Mazur's "meditative, musical, direct … poems frequently double back on themselves emotionally in a manner that is simultaneously tender and ironic." Townsend cited "Desire," about the remembered thrill of teen sexual discovery, as a particularly "masterful" poem in the collection, and praised the volume's "beautifully modulated language" and delicate balance of "poignancy and irony."

In They Can't Take That away from Me, which a writer for Tikkun described as a "searchingly and imaginatively restless" work, Mazur addresses similar themes, including family dynamics, nostalgia, and professional ambition. A contributor to Publishers Weekly felt that Mazur's "grasping Freudian overtones … overwhelm [some] poems" in this collection, including "My Dream after Mother Breaks Her Hip." In a Booklist review, however, Donna Seaman hailed the poems' "warm and compelling voice," noting that seemingly simple works "grow stealthily in complexity and resonance."

Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems offers twenty-two new works as well as selections from Mazur's four earlier books. The title poems refers to the fact that the poet's distant relative, Marion, had briefly been married to Zeppo Marx, part of the famous Marx Brothers comedy act. Tikkun critic David Gewanter observed that, in this poem, "instant fame, jealousy, comic violence, and a procession of masquerades spool back and forth, a Midsummer's Night Dream from the Maine woods to the planks of Broadway." Gewanter enjoyed Mazur's keen interest in "the delights and disorders that characterize a postmodern and multi-everything America," noting that this breadth of interest enriches the volume with references that range from Russian poetry to Michelangelo, from Ellis Island to the Houston Zoo. Robert Pinsky, reviewing the collection in Washington Post Book World, described the title poem as "an aria on the importance of what goes unnoticed." Mazur, as Pinsky explained, "uses social comedy to illustrate metaphysical pathos"—in this case, the attraction, but frivolity, of fame. Though Mazur explores this theme with a "deceptively quiet voice," Pinsky added, her work nevertheless possesses a satisfyingly "large scope."

Mazur once commented: "I began the poetry readings in the Blacksmith House Coffeeshop (the original building, by the way, of Longfellow's Village Smithy), hoping to create a place for the poetry community to meet and listen to poetry. The whole project succeeded far beyond my first tentative dream: the readings are crowded every week; we all look forward to those evenings and the sense of a real world of poetry which the program supports; in concert with the Grolier Bookshop, the Blacksmith sponsors an annual poetry prize reading, two or three poets each spring. The anthologies (Blacksmith Press) grew naturally from these readings. What writer doesn't want to see a literary event documented? For me, what began without much forethought or ambition has blossomed into a mission: to keep the thing going, to support and validate the work of poets, to make a dent in the isolation writers feel in their working life. I'm hooked on readings now, can't imagine I'll stop. And of course, the stimulation for me, as a poet, has been tremendous."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, September 1, 2006, "Laughter in the Confessional," p. 5.

Booklist, April 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of They Can't Take That away from Me, p. 1528.

Hudson Review, winter, 1987, Robert McDowell, review of The Pose of Happiness; winter, 2003, review of They Can't Take That away from Me.

Poetry, May, 1987, Sandra M. Gilbert, review of The Pose of Happiness, p. 111.

Publishers Weekly, March 27, 1995, review of The Common, p. 80; March 26, 2001, review of They Can't Take That away from Me, p. 86.

Tikkun, March, 2002, review of They Can't Take That away from Me, p. 78; March 1, 2007, David Gewanter, review of Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems, p. 77.

Washington Post Book World, December 18, 2005, Robert Pinsky, "Poet's Choice," p. 12.

Women's Review of Books, December, 1995, Alison Townsend, review of The Common, p. 26.