The Common

By Gail Mazur

Book Overview

At the heart of Gail Mazur's The Common is the refusal to simplify what is paradoxical in our world and a recognition of the tensions in our own divided nature. These unflinching poems create a place where wisdom and foolishness, fear and courage, rage and pity, love and diffidence, naturally co-exist.

Desire, ambition, devotion, and devastating loss are all subjects for Mazur's clear-eyed poems, which resonate with the contradictions between the body's yearning and the mind's acknowledgment of the consequences of our choices. In a poetry driven by unrelenting questioning, Mazur tries, in Rilke's worlds, "to love the questions themselves."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226514390
• ISBN13: 9780226514390
• Release Date: April 1995
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 81 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

This is a very movng, funny, and extremely readable book.

It's such a pleasure to read a book of poems that's both moving and funny and completely accessible. Gail Mazur is one of the most HONEST poets writing today--unpretentious yet subtle. There are poems about family and identity, full of self-irony and wit. This is a truly enjoyable and enriching book by one of my favorite poets.