E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Possibility Glimpsed Through Windows: A Review of Ben Mazer’s Selected Poems Ben Mazer.  Selected Poems . (Ashville, NC: MadHat Press, 2017). 248 pp., with a preface by Philip Nikolayev.   A project that has been incubating since his debut collection White Cities (Barbara Matteau Editions, 1995), Ben Mazer’s Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2017) has arrived. Spanning over twenty years of zealous creative output, this volume begins with three euphonious glimpses of Mazer’s poetic career. To read these early poems is to peer through the ornate window of some far-flung edifice to discover scenery and situations ripe with the allure of intrigue and espionage, as in the poem “The Traveller”:                           In a strange country, there is only one                ...

BRILLIANT POET AND SCHOLAR BEN MAZER Good to see brilliant poet and scholar  Ben Mazer get a review in a recent issue of the NYRB from Helen Vendler no less for his scholarly Collected John Crowe Ransom . She admires Ben's editorial work but is almost comically prim in doling out praise to Ransom himself, who she seeks to place as resolutely minor-minor. Her understanding of his Christian ironies is oddly limited. For instance she asks what a poem that references roses and hay has to do with Christ? Anyone familiar with religious symbolism can answer that in seconds. She claims it strange to title a book Poems About God in 1919; yet that collection is a collection of poems about religious belief. She later accuses Ransom of writing as God in "a language never heard on earth or heaven" which is a rather odd complaint. If God does not exist poets can surely invent any language they want for Her; if She does exist, explain Miltonic rhetoric as being any less ecc...

BEN MAZER, AMERICAN POET OF GREAT TALENT Ben Mazer - Harvard-educated poet and scholar - remains one of the more fascinating and surprising of contemporary American poets, with a high-modernist and unapologetic rhetorical gift that fuses aspects of Early Eliot and the Fugitives with Lowell and even Crane . He is daring, eccentric, and passionate, creating lyric poems as moving and beautiful as any ever written in English.  These below are some of his best poems. Eyewear, the blog is thrilled to offer them to the world to read today, before their first appearance in printed form later in a new collection. His edition of the Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom was recently reviewed favourably in the TLS by John Greening . These love poems are Mazer's pinnacle so far. They have his poetics and the poetry combined at his highest level. These new poems will make any person, poet or otherwise, love him, cry with him, and be him.      ...