A new inclusiveness, a heady freedom, grounded in the facts of mortality, inform Gail Mazur s recent poems, as if making them has served as both a bunker and a promontory, a way to survive, and to be exposed to, the profound underlying subject of this book: a husband s approaching death. The intimate particulars of a shared life are seen from a great height and then there s the underlife of the bunker: endurance, holding on, life as uncompromising reality. This new work, possessed by the unique devil-may-care intensity of someone writing at the end of her nerves, makes "Figures in a...

A draughtsman's draughtsman, Hokusai at 70
thought he'd begun to grasp the structures

of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way
plants grow, hoped that by 90 he'd have
penetrated to their essential nature.

And more, by 100, I will have reached the stage
where every dot, every mark I make will be
alive. You always loved that resolve, you'd repeat

joyfully-Hokusai's utterance of faith
in work's possibilities, its reward, that,
at 130, he'd perhaps have learned to draw.

Gail Mazur's...