"Ben Mazer is lyric poetry's
true hero and has not compromised one iota, as
his amazing works attest with their singular purity,
beauty and heartbreak."
—Philip
Nikolayev
"Like fragments of old
photographs happened on in a drawer, Ben Mazer's
poems tap enigmatic bits of the past that suddenly
come to life again. To read him is to follow him
along a dreamlike corridor where everything is
beautiful and nothing is as it seems."
—John
Ashbery
"Ben Mazer is one of the
few poets of his generation to understand that
only mastery of craft will bring you to the natural
breath, and that to sing memorably in verse, with
the body, on the line, is the only way to sound
the depths of the passing moment."
—Glyn
Maxwell
"I am a great admirer of
Ben Mazer's poetry."
—John
Kinsella
Poems collects Ben
Mazer's poems of the past ten years for the first
time, and is nearly half made up of poems written
in the past two years. Many of the poems have
been featured in Fulcrum and other international
periodicals; many are published here for the first
time. The poems in this long-awaited collection
topple divisions between the 'traditional' and
the 'avant-garde' in the exquisite independence
of their lyricism, and prove Ben Mazer to be among
the most important poets of our time.
Reviews
"Mazer's poems find aesthetic unity by arranging their emotional resonances in the themes and variations of the musical phrase, giving both voice and silence to the personal experiences that evade language. [...]
Like a daguerreotype, these poems feel like boiling mercury, and through a chemical reaction, these images and musical gestures reveal themselves. The poem is like a symphony of objects."
— Christopher Bock, in Jacket
"Beauty, humor, intellect, loss: [...] Mazer gathers these disparate aspects to find a point of intersect."
— Daniel Pritchard, on January 2008
"This collection lands squarely on its feet, balanced like an Olympic athlete— Mazer knows his craft and feels agile enough to do somersaults."
— Irene Koronas
