Nice Jacket, Ben Mazer

Many people fashion themselves poets. They stay quiet when everyone else talks. They find drama in their Budweisers, call the sky cobalt, and sometimes kind of smell (or is that just me?). Less than many people who fashion themselves poets are truly decent working poets — you know, the kind whose work you actually want to read. And fewer people still look like poets and write like poets and are respected by poets and have their poems praised in poetry magazines.

Case in point: Ben Mazer.

Recently Mazer (January 2008 / Dark Sky Books) was praised in Jacket Magazine.

Here’s a snippet from the review, written by Christopher Bock:

The poems in January 2008 sputter like severed electrical wires firing and trying to find a place to reconnect their currency. Handling these poems is like handling live electricity. As in Poems, the poet is composing a symphony of objects for the ear and mind. Yet these poems feel more desperate, more exhausted, more alive, and less apparently wedded to the English lyric tradition.

It seems extremely difficult to talk about a book that contains 135 poems, the bulk of which are without titles, which enact such a broad range of verse as:

Ice kindled trees to life in passive fog.
The shadows settle on the wires log
too absent early. Then he heard eavesdrop
the marching others hush and the wind stop.

and:

Snaggly waggly went to fair,
saw the natty raccoon there.
When the raccoon went to play,
Snaggly waggly ran away.

These two isolated examples speak to the range of the poems contained within January 2008. There are moments of grace in which the self confronts the self in the shadow of nature and the echo of the sublime.

Read the entire review at Jacket Magazine.

And if you want to get your hands on some of Ben’s poetry, visit Dark Sky Books now and we’ll ship you a copy of his stellar collection.