Books by Gail Mazur

"'Land's End' promises to be the crowning achievement of this master of the descriptive-meditative narrative poem. Here Gail Mazur powerfully evokes the past, while still writing from the firm ground of the present. In the book's title poem, a beautifully crafted elegy to poets who have passed on, Mazur also charges us with the responsibility of nurturing art and artists of the future, especially in the face of the absurdities of contemporary politics. Throughout the New Poems section, Mazur continues to write with the kind of lyric authority, emotional range, and intellectual and social scope that we have come to expect from her award-winning poetry, and this new and selected volume offers Mazur's very best poems from her seven previous books"--

Now, from the sweet fragrance of roses, bitterness stings our nostrils. The bay's withdrawn from us, the beach is littered with broken things - splintered oars, bits of old clay pipe from a long ago shipwreck, fragments of china plates. Enchanting, those days my townspeople scavenged rare cargo, furnishing their long winters with random wares.