Synopsis "The Ruined Millionaire (in English)"
"Mazer, along with his northeastern companions Nikolayev and Kapovich- of the further norths and further easts-make jubilant singing verse as they step through the western wreckage. This must be remembered, say the only poets who'll matter, so I must write in the ways of memory." -Glyn Maxwell, from the Preface "These poems are like trees that contain and protect and conceal themselves from themselves. Each wears a rough coat over the sap, the heart, the rainwater and scars. In so many ways the bark of a tree is a scroll with its messages written out of and into its experience. Mazer's poems know they are beautiful the way the wooden rills on a tree are elegant, made of history, of romance and pride." -Fanny Howe "Ben Mazer is a true inheritor of John Ashbery's legacy, specifically the Ashbery of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Like that classic of American poetry, The Ruined Millionaire ironically also suits the contemporary European scene. In translation, Mazer's new selected poems could just as easily fit on a shelf of the best contemporary Polish or French poetry. Anglophone readers are lucky to have them available to us first." -John Hennessy "What we can't think to say, what we don't know how to say, whether of experience cosmic or minute, he says. The white picket fence that is always intense, the little house between the two big ones, what a movie is. His comparisons are wildly accurate but they aren't really comparisons at all. They come from similar and related as easily as far away and disparate places or thoughts, which is remarkable for its multidimensionality of seeing. His metaphors are never arbitrary or half convincing, but come from the unconscious. And the sounds fit the sense-there are lines to rival Yeats. And he can sustain a long poem without lagging. Only one who feels every nuance, who suffers intense emotions could write such great poems." -Ruth Lepson "The year's most essential book of poetry." -Michael Londra in SpoKe
