A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur’s recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be exposed to, the profound underlying subject of this book: a husband’s approaching death. The intimate particulars of a shared life are seen from a great height—and then there’s the underlife of the bunker: endurance, holding on, life as uncompromising reality. This new work, possessed by the unique devil-may-care intensity of someone writing at the end of her nerves, makes Figures in a Landscape feel radiant, visionary, and exhilarating, rather than elegiac. Mazur’s masterly fusion of abstraction with the facts of a life creates a coming to terms with what Yeats called “the aboriginal ice.”

Gail Mazur is the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, Zeppo’s First Wife: New and Selected Poems, and They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a finalist for the National Book Award, both published by the University of Chicago Press. She is founder and director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches in Emerson College's Graduate Program in Writing, Literature and Publishing. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College.

Acknowledgments

One

    Hermit
    Poem
    The Age
    The Island
    To the Makers
    Shipwreck
    While You Were Out
    Late September
    October
    Notes in Chalk on a Ruined Bridge
    Figures in a Landscape

Two

    History of My Timidity
    Dear Migraine,
    Asymmetrical Millay November
    To the Women of My Family
    Another Form
    In Another Country
    Post-Pastoral
    Autobiographia Misereria
    Inward Conversation

Three

    Wedding Album
    Borges in Cambridge, 1967
    American Scene, 1935
    Isaac Rosenberg
    F & the Interpretation of Dreams
    Little Tempest
    10,000 Days
    Concordance to a Life’s Work
    Daisy, Daisy
    Poem at the End of August