They Can't Take That Away from Me

Gail is a true poet. Reading her book has made me a better person and much more of a HUMAN being.................in that she helps me linger longer as I savour the true blue of Forget-Me-Nots in the spring or as I feel the welcomed warmth of the sun after a long winter in New England. If you've ever had children you will love her poem "Young Apple Tree, December". She stops time so you can enjoy the real and wonderful things in life that are so easily lost in an out-of-pace world.

Gail Mazur's poems are personal, often autobiographical, but they are rarely "merely" either. Her new collection, THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, is her best not only because the poems explore more deeply her abiding subjects: individual and cultural memory; the inner promptings of the soul and the "gossamer thread" (Whitman) of thought it flings out to the world; the strict consolations of art. Mazur's new poems push the stylistic envelope of the contemporary meditative lyric. Shining examples include the title poem with its long first sentence--a question!--expertly orchestrated over 36 lines; the "Five Poems Entitled 'Questions'" that initiate the book; or the piercing renditions--indelible tracings, really--of texts by Michelangelo and the postwar Italian poet, Vittorio Sereni. Key poems in the volume are deeply moving acts of imaginative empathy--"Young Apple Tree, December"; "Girl in a Library"--while others like "Twenty Lines Before Breakfast" crackle with linguistic invention. If you believe, as did Hardy, that "the poet should touch our hearts by showing his own ... takes note of nothing that he cannot feel...[and embodies] the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own," then this book is for you.