Description
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.”
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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 havepenetrated to their essential nature. And more, by 100, I will have reached the stagewhere every dot, every mark I make will bealive. 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.
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