They Can't Take That Away from Me (Phoenix Poets Series) (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "What is my purpose in life if not to peer into the glazed bowl of silence and fill it for myself with words?..." (more)
Key Phrases: Vittorio Sereni

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Departing little from such well-titled volumes as The Common and The Pose of Happiness, this fourth collection contains well-crafted poems about Jewish-American middle-class midlife and strife, thoughtful ekphrases, and nostalgic goings-over of origins and relationships: "Once, when I was a child,/ my mother lied to me. Maybe that day/ I was too demanding, more likely I needed/ consolation my schoolmates so lucky,/ so confident,/ so gentile." Such concerns carry over into the poet's literary life (a dominant theme), as "Keep Going" makes clear: "...your name misspelled on last evening's program;// the party uptown after the ceremonies and readings / an editor praising C's poems as if you weren't// standing there beside him, craving appreciation." The title poem's Gershwin-refrained questionings "wouldn't I choose if I could not to be human or/ any other mammal programmed for cruelty?" give way, in "I Wish I Want I Need," to unhurried lines explaining the plot of the 1970s film The Way We Were and why the speaker admires Barbra Streisand's performance therein. The grasping Freudian overtones finally overwhelm poems like "My Dream after Mother Breaks Her Hip" ("I can't dream her power away/ I'm caught here/ in eternity's shade// where I begin to move/ gradually gracelessly/ to embrace her// tree muse emptiness/ cage world") and aren't really ever relieved here, even by "Three Provincetown Mornings."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Mazur's poems read like phone calls from a friend who confides a rush of contradictory feelings in a warm and compelling voice that could, dear reader, be your own. In "Questions," she reenacts the interrogations everyone performs on themselves in the dark times, sessions that revolve around the cry, "What is my purpose in life?" Elsewhere Mazur frets over her relationships with her mother and her daughter so naturally that it's easy to forget that these are keenly shaped poems that grow stealthily in complexity and resonance. A conversation with a stranger in a clinic, an old man spluttering racist remarks, takes the poet back to her childhood, a lost world where she shoplifted beauty aids and learned to drive. In "Girl in a Library," she wants to rescue a reading girl from what the future will bring, to tell her that "love's not safe for her." Safety, of course, is merely an illusion, as may be love, but, Mazur suggests, the very act of being, whatever the circumstances, is precious. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press; 1 edition (April 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0226514447
• ISBN-13: 978-0226514444
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,575,137 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mazur's best book so far, April 20, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: They Can't Take That Away from Me (Phoenix Poets Series) (Paperback)

Gail Mazur's poems are personal, often autobiographical, but they are rarely "merely" either. Her new collection, THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, is her best not only because the poems explore more deeply her abiding subjects: individual and cultural memory; the inner promptings of the soul and the "gossamer thread" (Whitman) of thought it flings out to the world; the strict consolations of art. Mazur's new poems push the stylistic envelope of the contemporary meditative lyric. Shining examples include the title poem with its long first sentence--a question!--expertly orchestrated over 36 lines; the "Five Poems Entitled 'Questions'" that initiate the book; or the piercing renditions--indelible tracings, really--of texts by Michelangelo and the postwar Italian poet, Vittorio Sereni. Key poems in the volume are deeply moving acts of imaginative empathy--"Young Apple Tree, December"; "Girl in a Library"--while others like "Twenty Lines Before Breakfast" crackle with linguistic invention. If you believe, as did Hardy, that "the poet should touch our hearts by showing his own ... takes note of nothing that he cannot feel...[and embodies] the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own," then this book is for you.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "a true poet.....", May 15, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: They Can't Take That Away from Me (Phoenix Poets Series) (Paperback)

Gail is a true poet. Reading her book has made me a better
person and much more of a HUMAN being.................in that she helps me linger longer as I savour the true blue of Forget-Me-Nots in the spring or as I feel the welcomed warmth of the sun after a long winter in New England. If you've ever had children you will love her poem "Young Apple Tree, December". She stops time so you can enjoy the real and wonderful things in life that are so easily lost in an out-of-pace world.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mazur's best book so far, April 20, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: They Can't Take That Away from Me (Phoenix Poets Series) (Paperback)

Gail Mazur's poems are personal, often autobiographical, but they are rarely "merely" either. Her new collection, THEY CAN'T TAKE THAT AWAY FROM ME, is her best not only because the poems explore more deeply her abiding subjects: individual and cultural memory; the inner promptings of the soul and the "gossamer thread" (Whitman) of thought it flings out to the world; the strict consolations of art. Mazur's new poems push the stylistic envelope of the contemporary meditative lyric. Shining examples include the title poem with its long first sentence--a question!--expertly orchestrated over 36 lines; the "Five Poems Entitled 'Questions'" that initiate the book; or the piercing renditions--indelible tracings, really--of texts by Michelangelo and the postwar Italian poet, Vittorio Sereni. Key poems in the volume are deeply moving acts of imaginative empathy--"Young Apple Tree, December"; "Girl in a Library"--while others like "Twenty Lines Before Breakfast" crackle with linguistic invention. If you believe, as did Hardy, that "the poet should touch our hearts by showing his own ... takes note of nothing that he cannot feel...[and embodies] the emotion of all the ages and the thought of his own," then this book is for you.