Forbidden City

In Forbidden City, Gail Mazur weaves together art and elegy, East and West, to create another masterfully constructed, award-worthy book of poems. Her last book in the series, Figures in a Landscape, ostensibly an homage to her late husband, the artist Michael Mazur, was not just a chronicle of the artist's approaching death, but took particulars from their shared life, as if viewed from afar, to create a sense of radiance and exhilaration of a long life of companionship, even as Mazur dealt with her impending grief--hence the book's title. In this new book, Mazur goes even further, as she examines the relation between art and life ("ars longa, vita brevis," the Latin inversion of the famous aphorism from Hippocrates) more broadly, rising above the sadness of her earlier book to build, as one of our readers said, "a meditative structure, contemplating the relation of art and life, and the limitations and possibilities of each and their combination." The poems in Forbidden City are "whimsical and laughing," "poignant" in their "absurdity," as the reader says, and the book contains "the theme of grief without ever sounding merely aggrieved."