[Chris Hanson]

This is sad news. Worm 39 was the first place to accept my work, and I was thrilled to bits when it happened.
I admired Margaret's work and her general approach to poetry.

[Petra Norr]

This is such sad news. I knew Maz from the Gazebo. The subject matter of her poems was original and different, her writing very creative and engaging. Her poems were like stories to me. I remember many of them and the “characters” in them. Much of her poetry is in the Gazebo archives.

[David Anthony]

I am very sad to hear this.
Maz was one of the finest poets to emerge from the internet.

[Michael Juster]

She was an obvious talent, but you also couldn't help feeling she had a decency beneath it all that would have made her a lovely neighbor who would keep finding ways to make the community better.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Terrible news.

Nemo

[Marcia Karp]

I'm so sorry to hear this.

Marcia

[Mark Blaeuer]

A reminder about collecting her poems for a book (which I think is an excellent idea, by the way): internet sites vanish constantly, and some of her web-printed poems will go along with them eventually. I had to use at least one Google cache on that account in my post above. Hopefully, she kept printouts of published work, or stored them on her hard drive, and these will survive to be reprinted if heirs and editors approve.

On the other hand, as drafts have been mentioned, we know she posted some on Eratosphere and undoubtedly elsewhere. I don’t know whether all of them wound up as published, but I recall them as being quite polished. I realize those have long since been pruned from the Sphere, but I remember a thread here from a few years ago, maybe on General Talk, where someone linked to a website that provided a way of going back in time to retrieve “ancient” threads (ones that had already disappeared even in cached form) on Eratosphere and perhaps other workshopping sites. I couldn’t locate that thread, but it the tool still exists, it’d be very helpful.

[Rose Kelleher]

Originally Posted by Michael Juster

She was an obvious talent, but you also couldn't help feeling she had a decency beneath it all

Exactly.

She could be tough, in her upright English way, and she wasn't afraid to ruffle feathers. But she once mentioned casually that when bees get exhausted, you can revive them with a spoonful of sugar water. I was like, who the hell spoonfeeds bees???

And the fact is, if she ruffled your feathers, you probably needed it. She disliked pomp and pretension and anything that smacked of hypocrisy. That's what made her such a good satirist.

[OPW Fredericks]

I'll miss her, and her words, the way they skipped and danced across and down the page.

for Maz

Her touch, so light,
the pixie
skimming dandelions.

O.P.W.

[Gregory Dowling]

Very sad news. Janet is right and people beyond the world of poetry websites should be informed about this fine poet. One could make a start, as Janet suggests, by informing the people of Poole. Perhaps someone here who knows her work well could contact the Bournemouth Daily Echo, which would have been her local newspaper, and propose an obituary. That might lead to other contacts.