John Yau Reviews Gail Mazur's New Poetry at Hyperallergic

John Yau knew Gail and Michael Mazur while still an undergraduate at Bard College. When Michael Mazur died from congestive heart failure, Gail Mazur composed Forbidden City, and at Hyperallergic, Yau is left to consider poetry written after the death of a loved one.

Aptly titled, Forbidden City is Gail Mazur’s seventh book of poetry. Before getting the book — which she sent me — I knew that Gail had written the poems in the years after her husband, Michael Mazur (1935–2009), had died of congestive heart failure. I met Gail and Michael in 1972, shortly after I graduated from Bard College and moved to Allston, Massachusetts, a city I was familiar with, having grown up in the Brookline, the next town. In 1975, I moved to New York City, glad to leave this world behind.

Although I met Gail and Michael while I was living in and around Boston for those few years — and Gail gave me my first reading at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge, as I have recounted elsewhere — I did not become friends with them until years later. The beginning of our friendship happened in Provincetown, Massachusetts, during the summer of 2001, a few months after my daughter, Cerise, was born, and a few months before 9/11. I believe by then that Michael already had problems with his heart, and that one of our mutual friends, most likely Catherine Murphy, had told me.

I remember meeting Michael for lunch at a well-known Provincetown eatery that has since gone out-of-business. These and other mundane memories surfaced during the two days that Forbidden City sat on the dining room table, still in the brown mailer. At this point in my life — I am about to turn 66 — death seems more palpable than ever before. Said to me when I turned 50, Robert Creeley’s words have started to sound different these past couple of years: “Now you’re one of the old guys.”

All I am trying to say is that part of me did not want to read Forbidden City. I wanted to peruse the other books gathered on my desk, and I did. Contrary to what has been said in any number of ways, it is not difficult to get the news from poems: it is difficult to be open to what they have to tell you about living, about what daily life is like after the person you have been married to for your entire adult life has died.

Continue at Hyperallergic.