Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems (Phoenix Poets)

. . . 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 Mazurs poetry crackles with verbal invention as she confronts the inevitable upheavals of a lived life. Zeppos First Wife, which includes excerpts from Mazurs 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. Mazurs 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 birds-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.

Gail Mazur's most recent book, They Can't Take That Away from Me, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. She is Distinguished Writer in Residence in Emerson College's Writing, Literature, and Publishing Program and founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Insitute of Radcliffe College as well as the St. Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award.

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