Forbidden City - (Phoenix Poets) by Gail Mazur (Paperback)

About the Book

In "Forbidden City," Gail Mazur weaves together art and elegy, East and West, to create another masterfully constructed, award-worthy book of poems. Her last book in the series, "Figures in a Landscape," ostensibly an homage to her late husband, the artist Michael Mazur, was not just a chronicle of the artist s approaching death, but took particulars from their shared life, as if viewed from afar, to create a sense of radiance and exhilaration of a long life of companionship, even as Mazur dealt with her impending grief hence the book s title. In this new book, Mazur goes even further, as she examines the relation between art and life ( ars longa, vita brevis, the Latin inversion of the famous aphorism from Hippocrates) more broadly, rising above the sadness of her earlier book to build, as one of our readers said, a meditative structure, contemplating the relation of art and life, and the limitations and possibilities of each and their combination. The poems in "Forbidden City" are whimsical and laughing, poignant in their absurdity, as the reader says, and the book contains the theme of grief without ever sounding merely aggrieved. "

Book Synopsis

from "Mount Fuji"

A draughtsman's draughtsman, Hokusai at 70
thought he'd begun to grasp the structures

of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way
plants grow, hoped that by 90 he'd have
penetrated to their essential nature.

And more, by 100, I will have reached the stage
where every dot, every mark I make will be
alive. You always loved that resolve, you'd repeat

joyfully-Hokusai's utterance of faith
in work's possibilities, its reward, that,
at 130, he'd perhaps have learned to draw.

Gail Mazur's poems in Forbidden City build an engaging meditative structure upon the elements of mortality and art, eloquently contemplating the relationship of art and life-and the dynamic possibilities of each in combination. At the collection's heart is the poet's long marriage to the artist Michael Mazur (1935-2009). A fascinating range of tone infuses the book-grieving, but clear-eyed rather than lugubrious, sometimes whimsical, even comical, and often exuberant. The note of pleasure, as in an old tradition enriched by transience, runs through the work, even in the final poem, "Grief," where "our ravenous hold on the world" is a powerful central element.

Review Quotes

"No one--and I mean no one--writes poems as chock full of such nuanced feeling as Gail Mazur. She is as good as it gets. Has the elegiac ever seemed so vibrant and full of breathing space as it does here? The poems in Forbidden City run light and true under hard losses. They are heroic in the best possible way, fully open to sorrow and fear but keeping their wits about them at all times. I love them, and envy their generous powers."--David Rivard

"With courageous disinterestedness, Mazur turns private particulars into universal images with a light poetic touch. We feel what she feels in the most ordinary objects and images that shine as human touchstones for our common longings and laments."
-- "Harvard Review Online"

"Mazur examines her response to desolation with unsparing meticulousness. The results are poems that expand our understanding of the consolation of nature, the miracles of art, and the power of imagination. . . . In its passion and invention, line by line, Forbidden City reveals Gail Mazur as an artist writing at the height of her powers." -- "On the Seawall"

"Powerful. . . . Mazur's poems register the constant tug between holding on and letting go that is an inescapable condition of her life: she is always bumping up against a glimmer from the past or the future, even as she goes through each day."-- "Hyperallergic"

About the Author

Gail Mazur is the author of seven books of poems, including They Can't Take That Away from Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Zeppo's First Wife, a Massachusetts Book Award winner and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is distinguished writer in residence at Emerson College.