Review of Ben Mazer’s "February Poems" & "December Poems" by Paul S. Rowe
"Nothing More Than Us": A Review of Ben Mazer’s February Poems and December Poems
Ben Mazer’s December Poems and February Poems comprise a serious project on the nature of love, madness, and restoration. In the "Epilogue" to part one of this project, December Poems, the precursor to this year’s February Poems, Mazer writes
After a while the branches blue and thicken
with winter darkness, stillnesses that quicken
the senses, and an orange light comes on,
a single flare that signifies day’s gone.
With these final lines, daylight flees the lover’s field of vision, phantasmal shadows lengthen to fill white space, and Mazer’s lyric hovers in memory as its crescendo fades. Shadows remain after the sun of marriage has set. December Poems, perhaps Mazer’s most personal collection, owes much of its power to the crestfallen voice of its poetic speaker. Yet as subjective as these poems appear, the relationship between Mazer’s speaker and the reality of the poet’s own life is incommensurable. What makes Mazer’s distinct brand of neo-Romanticism so provocative is its bewilderment that "there is a lot to see / in first encountered history"—its study of the epiphanic experience of poetry.
From December Poems to February Poems, Mazer bridges the gap between subjectivity and the poetic process—his exploration of what it means for a poet to hear voices in his head, to allow the text’s rhythms, intonations, and phonic echoes to inspire the poet’s own exhalation of these voices on the page. While December Poems presents a Romantic descent into darkness, madness, and despondency, unlike Wordsworth who finds respite from his fear of insanity through forging of a deeper connection with his fellow man, Mazer is more like Shelley or Rilke—Mazer transmogrifies memories and wills the reformation of the past through a lyric voice that revivifies what was once thought lost. In Ashbery’s own words, when reading Mazer, "enigmatic bits of the past… suddenly come to life again." Mazer’s conjurations of the past are his most extraordinary poetic gifts throughout these two collections.
Mazer writes in December Poems,
The Christmas lights shine briskly all the year.
I will not take them down till you are here.
For Mazer and his readers, Christmas lights, wedding photographs, or the flickering luster from apartment windows glanced in passing become re-ignited with meaning. Mazer’s sensibility will not ignore these flickerings, nor will the poet betray his impulse to express the impact of the past on present emotion. Though the speaker’s lover has fled like the poet’s own wife, he wills her presence through an apostrophic command to recognize her own charming vivacity:
Do not consume, like the flowers, time, and air
or worm-soil, plantings buried in spring,
presume over morning coffee I don’t care,
neglect the ethereal life to life you bring.
Although this is an apostrophe to an absent lover, ironically it is the speaker who bequeaths the lover this "ethereal life" for readers. It is the speaker who re-animates the lover and achieves something that the lover failed to bring about. The past is corrected through the lyric present.
Mazer’s lyric breath attempts to stall time. Like Orpheus, the speaker here creates what Rossetti termed a "moment’s monument" for an absent lover; the world becomes "bereft of a clock" and "the wind goes running through the hair of the trees." This wind, Mazer’s breath of inspiration blowing lightly through foliage—objects Mazer deems "strange divisions of eternities"—becomes a manifestation of his own poetic process. For Mazer, objects seek unification with the artist just as his sensibility and its reaction to bereavement mingle gracefully throughout both collections.
It’s important to note that Mazer’s revocation of his reader’s sense of time is another Romantic aspect of his work. Both December Poems and February Poems are caught up in a rebuilding process that blends nostalgia an intense hope for a brighter day. Mazer’s work seems to express philosopher Ernst Bloch’s idea that not all people exist is the same "Now," rejecting the alienating present, yearning for a future mingled with nostalgia. Mazer does not represent these past events, though: his poems subsume the past, creating a reality for readers that is at once strangely singular and deeply relevant to them.
Unlike a Romantic poet such as Shelley though, Mazer doesn’t furiously pile on his metaphors and similes. His breath is more relaxed, his similes selective and at times unforgettable. Consider for a moment the following passage, some of Mazer’s finest verse:
This unrequited longing, that you might
read what I wrote, and know then what I felt,
like flutes upon an aztec ship of longing.
The overflow of feeling here is one riven by the air, the sea, and the lost lover: all forces are combined by a choice simile melding sound, strife, and sentiment. Through metaphors that reconcile forces of nature with feeling, Mazer tempers the incoherent discord between his speaker’s present mental state and cherished memories. Forces of nature are driven out of hiding to make sense of confounding sorrow. Consider the following sonnet from February Poems:
The star that is Mozart’s is timeless and keen,
twinkling up high through the window’s sheen,
emanating music in a wealth of silence,
the troubles on earth lucubration vents.
The white marble busts are cold and lonely
on the mantel, useless, instilling fear
in the lover with silence to talk to only,
now the beloved is not here.
Why should the stars look over the earth,
its chaos and madness, of all sense its dearth,
but to bring roses to life again,
in cold, twinkling memory remembering when
happy in the garden, we felt such joy,
glad to be living, just a girl and a boy.
Here, memory becomes a form of sensory perception. Readers receive transmissions from the stars—impressions that memory can mingle with the senses in a synesthesia of sorts. Ultimately, a higher level of meaning is brought about. The reciprocity between the inner and outer worlds takes center stage, and Mazer asks readers to question what it is that brings pleasant memories to mind: is it the music heard in the form of memory called forth by observation? Or are memories somehow engraved upon objects we encounter, like the music we associate with a certain person, or the moments that inspire certain melodies? Through this process of poetic assignment, Mazer breathes his cosmic intention, subduing to his yoke the natural forces that awe us. The stars shine to stimulate the poet to reanimate the past for his readers.
Just as distinct objects are illuminated in distinct ways in Mazer’s poems, readers are challenged to see themselves as objects abandoned by the forces of inner life. In the following poem, both absent lover and forlorn poet are reconstituted as meager artifacts when compared to the great love that has deserted them:
Beethoven casts a sad dim luminous glow
over the candles flickering, the entire scene,
my lover in shadows, and the street below,
and we are remnants all of what has been.
Hope, like a flame preserved, yet casts new life
into desire, its grander scope than life,
for all that never was, that should have been,
the shadows grope for someplace to begin.
The furious storm of crisis in the heart
threatens to tear the human soul apart;
the greatest passion, compelled to take a wife,
can dream no victory but eternal life,
to stay the hours, above all memory,
to fullest presence, where true lovers see
the naked soul, in all its fragile need,
pure knowledge, love, with nothing to concede.
Here an object does not cast a melody, nor does melody call to mind a particular object or event. Music casts its own light so Mazer can then shed shades of meaning on the past. Here, "Hope, like a flame preserved, yet casts new life / into desire… and shadows grope for somewhere to begin." Here, the interlinear rhymes of "hope," "scope," and "grope," dilate and contract like shadows, and hope and passion are personified. Hope ventriloquizes this wintery speaker just as Mazer’s sensibility and its reaction to the past merge.
Throughout February Poems, "the greatest passion" is "compelled to take a wife," to "be understood," and to "do incalculable good." For Mazer, passions must harmonize with the forces that influence these passions. There must be a mutuality between the poet and the past as strong as the love that once thrived between man and wife, but this connection must be subtle enough speak the truth of poetic experience. As Mazer perceives it, "converging souls don’t see themselves converge, / they swim in the cosmos’ great eclipsing surge." Readers must experience this poetry as if they themselves were shadows of Mazer’s radiations, casting more profound perceptions on the relics the poet urges them to reexamine.
December Poems and February Poems bring readers back to winter months bereft of love, and Mazer begs them, like his speaker to his beloved, to "lie awhile in April and in May / beneath the trees, and harry [her] to stay / with tears of genuine love." The final section of February Poems, "The Advent of Spring," lingers into summer, fall, and winter beyond. This poetry compels us to wait and watch "through the window at the rains / for signs of life, here at the equinox."
This watchful sentinel is all of us. Mazer urges us to become "alert spectators of the echoing world / that promises itself before it is, / life’s catalyst, the phoenix from the dust." To perceive the coming transformation the poet wills into being is a breath of fresh air, and Mazer allows us to exhale as well, reenchanting our world. Once again, "we can look proud, and glamorous / because love’s beauty’s nothing more than us."
Ben Mazer’s December Poems and February Poems comprise a serious project on the nature of love, madness, and restoration. In the "Epilogue" to part one of this project, December Poems, the precursor to this year’s February Poems, Mazer writes
After a while the branches blue and thicken
with winter darkness, stillnesses that quicken
the senses, and an orange light comes on,
a single flare that signifies day’s gone.
With these final lines, daylight flees the lover’s field of vision, phantasmal shadows lengthen to fill white space, and Mazer’s lyric hovers in memory as its crescendo fades. Shadows remain after the sun of marriage has set. December Poems, perhaps Mazer’s most personal collection, owes much of its power to the crestfallen voice of its poetic speaker. Yet as subjective as these poems appear, the relationship between Mazer’s speaker and the reality of the poet’s own life is incommensurable. What makes Mazer’s distinct brand of neo-Romanticism so provocative is its bewilderment that "there is a lot to see / in first encountered history"—its study of the epiphanic experience of poetry.
From December Poems to February Poems, Mazer bridges the gap between subjectivity and the poetic process—his exploration of what it means for a poet to hear voices in his head, to allow the text’s rhythms, intonations, and phonic echoes to inspire the poet’s own exhalation of these voices on the page. While December Poems presents a Romantic descent into darkness, madness, and despondency, unlike Wordsworth who finds respite from his fear of insanity through forging of a deeper connection with his fellow man, Mazer is more like Shelley or Rilke—Mazer transmogrifies memories and wills the reformation of the past through a lyric voice that revivifies what was once thought lost. In Ashbery’s own words, when reading Mazer, "enigmatic bits of the past… suddenly come to life again." Mazer’s conjurations of the past are his most extraordinary poetic gifts throughout these two collections.
Mazer writes in December Poems,
The Christmas lights shine briskly all the year.
I will not take them down till you are here.
For Mazer and his readers, Christmas lights, wedding photographs, or the flickering luster from apartment windows glanced in passing become re-ignited with meaning. Mazer’s sensibility will not ignore these flickerings, nor will the poet betray his impulse to express the impact of the past on present emotion. Though the speaker’s lover has fled like the poet’s own wife, he wills her presence through an apostrophic command to recognize her own charming vivacity:
Do not consume, like the flowers, time, and air
or worm-soil, plantings buried in spring,
presume over morning coffee I don’t care,
neglect the ethereal life to life you bring.
Although this is an apostrophe to an absent lover, ironically it is the speaker who bequeaths the lover this "ethereal life" for readers. It is the speaker who re-animates the lover and achieves something that the lover failed to bring about. The past is corrected through the lyric present.
Mazer’s lyric breath attempts to stall time. Like Orpheus, the speaker here creates what Rossetti termed a "moment’s monument" for an absent lover; the world becomes "bereft of a clock" and "the wind goes running through the hair of the trees." This wind, Mazer’s breath of inspiration blowing lightly through foliage—objects Mazer deems "strange divisions of eternities"—becomes a manifestation of his own poetic process. For Mazer, objects seek unification with the artist just as his sensibility and its reaction to bereavement mingle gracefully throughout both collections.
It’s important to note that Mazer’s revocation of his reader’s sense of time is another Romantic aspect of his work. Both December Poems and February Poems are caught up in a rebuilding process that blends nostalgia an intense hope for a brighter day. Mazer’s work seems to express philosopher Ernst Bloch’s idea that not all people exist is the same "Now," rejecting the alienating present, yearning for a future mingled with nostalgia. Mazer does not represent these past events, though: his poems subsume the past, creating a reality for readers that is at once strangely singular and deeply relevant to them.
Unlike a Romantic poet such as Shelley though, Mazer doesn’t furiously pile on his metaphors and similes. His breath is more relaxed, his similes selective and at times unforgettable. Consider for a moment the following passage, some of Mazer’s finest verse:
This unrequited longing, that you might
read what I wrote, and know then what I felt,
like flutes upon an aztec ship of longing.
The overflow of feeling here is one riven by the air, the sea, and the lost lover: all forces are combined by a choice simile melding sound, strife, and sentiment. Through metaphors that reconcile forces of nature with feeling, Mazer tempers the incoherent discord between his speaker’s present mental state and cherished memories. Forces of nature are driven out of hiding to make sense of confounding sorrow. Consider the following sonnet from February Poems:
The star that is Mozart’s is timeless and keen,
twinkling up high through the window’s sheen,
emanating music in a wealth of silence,
the troubles on earth lucubration vents.
The white marble busts are cold and lonely
on the mantel, useless, instilling fear
in the lover with silence to talk to only,
now the beloved is not here.
Why should the stars look over the earth,
its chaos and madness, of all sense its dearth,
but to bring roses to life again,
in cold, twinkling memory remembering when
happy in the garden, we felt such joy,
glad to be living, just a girl and a boy.
Here, memory becomes a form of sensory perception. Readers receive transmissions from the stars—impressions that memory can mingle with the senses in a synesthesia of sorts. Ultimately, a higher level of meaning is brought about. The reciprocity between the inner and outer worlds takes center stage, and Mazer asks readers to question what it is that brings pleasant memories to mind: is it the music heard in the form of memory called forth by observation? Or are memories somehow engraved upon objects we encounter, like the music we associate with a certain person, or the moments that inspire certain melodies? Through this process of poetic assignment, Mazer breathes his cosmic intention, subduing to his yoke the natural forces that awe us. The stars shine to stimulate the poet to reanimate the past for his readers.
Just as distinct objects are illuminated in distinct ways in Mazer’s poems, readers are challenged to see themselves as objects abandoned by the forces of inner life. In the following poem, both absent lover and forlorn poet are reconstituted as meager artifacts when compared to the great love that has deserted them:
Beethoven casts a sad dim luminous glow
over the candles flickering, the entire scene,
my lover in shadows, and the street below,
and we are remnants all of what has been.
Hope, like a flame preserved, yet casts new life
into desire, its grander scope than life,
for all that never was, that should have been,
the shadows grope for someplace to begin.
The furious storm of crisis in the heart
threatens to tear the human soul apart;
the greatest passion, compelled to take a wife,
can dream no victory but eternal life,
to stay the hours, above all memory,
to fullest presence, where true lovers see
the naked soul, in all its fragile need,
pure knowledge, love, with nothing to concede.
Here an object does not cast a melody, nor does melody call to mind a particular object or event. Music casts its own light so Mazer can then shed shades of meaning on the past. Here, "Hope, like a flame preserved, yet casts new life / into desire… and shadows grope for somewhere to begin." Here, the interlinear rhymes of "hope," "scope," and "grope," dilate and contract like shadows, and hope and passion are personified. Hope ventriloquizes this wintery speaker just as Mazer’s sensibility and its reaction to the past merge.
Throughout February Poems, "the greatest passion" is "compelled to take a wife," to "be understood," and to "do incalculable good." For Mazer, passions must harmonize with the forces that influence these passions. There must be a mutuality between the poet and the past as strong as the love that once thrived between man and wife, but this connection must be subtle enough speak the truth of poetic experience. As Mazer perceives it, "converging souls don’t see themselves converge, / they swim in the cosmos’ great eclipsing surge." Readers must experience this poetry as if they themselves were shadows of Mazer’s radiations, casting more profound perceptions on the relics the poet urges them to reexamine.
December Poems and February Poems bring readers back to winter months bereft of love, and Mazer begs them, like his speaker to his beloved, to "lie awhile in April and in May / beneath the trees, and harry [her] to stay / with tears of genuine love." The final section of February Poems, "The Advent of Spring," lingers into summer, fall, and winter beyond. This poetry compels us to wait and watch "through the window at the rains / for signs of life, here at the equinox."
This watchful sentinel is all of us. Mazer urges us to become "alert spectators of the echoing world / that promises itself before it is, / life’s catalyst, the phoenix from the dust." To perceive the coming transformation the poet wills into being is a breath of fresh air, and Mazer allows us to exhale as well, reenchanting our world. Once again, "we can look proud, and glamorous / because love’s beauty’s nothing more than us."
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"Ben Mazer has resolved to tell us that love still matters; and that despite all of our brokenness, all our repeated failures at communication, this thing called love just refuses to go away."
- Ifeanyi Menkiti, owner of Grolier Poetry Book Shop You can purchase your own copy at Grolier Poetry Book Shop. |
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"These love poems are Mazer’s pinnacle so far. They have his poetics and the poetry combined at his highest level."
- Kevin Gallagher, publisher of spoKe You can purchase your own copy at Pen & Anvil Press. |
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Paul S. Rowe is co-editor of The Charles River Journal, published by Pen & Anvil Press in Boston. Paul's criticism, reviews, interviews, and poems appear or are forthcoming in Literary Imagination, Pusteblume, The New England Review of Books, PopMatters, FIVE:2:ONE, Eyewear, and Berfrois. Paul teaches literature and writing at Endicott College and Merrimack College and is a proud cat owner.
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Ben Mazer was born in New York City in 1964. He was educated at Harvard University, where he studied with Seamus Heaney and William Alfred, and at the Editorial Institute, Boston University, where his advisors were Christopher Ricks and Archie Burnett. He is the author of poetry collections including White Cities (Barbara Matteau Editions, 1995), Poems (Pen & Anvil, 2010), January 2008 (Dark Sky Books, 2010), New Poems (Pen & Anvil, 2013), and The Glass Piano (MadHat, 2015). He is the editor of The Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom (Un-Gyve, 2015), Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010), and Landis Everson’s Everything Preserved: Poems 1955–2005 (Graywolf Press, 2006), which won the first Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is the editor of The Battersea Review.
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