[Rose Kelleher]

Remembering the Grapes

senryu

Visiting the Surgical Ward

The Bateleur

Aftermath

In Foreign Fields

Demon Lover

Last Orders: The Movie

The Night Emile's Mistress Turned Into a Cat

nighthouse

several poems in miller's pond, including "Afters"


It's frustrating that so many of her poems are (AFAIK) unpublished, which makes posting them questionable. Her "Studying Savonarola" poem was actually pretty famous, and there are several links to it online (though they all seem to be broken now), so I'll go ahead and post it, and if anyone objects I'll take it down.

.
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Studying Savonarola, he considers his lover as kindling

With your amber eyes, yellow and red
of you, sun-sign heart like a blood orange
suspended in a porcelain cage, say you burn

in a courtyard and your ichor drips like honey
on the firewood, on the branches bound in fasces,
flesh fumed in the air, dark as molasses,

but what you are hovers as mist, as the spirit
of water is invisible until steam makes the sky
waver. Say you die, scorched into ashes, say

you pass from here to there, with your marigold
eyes, the garden darker for lack of one golden flower,
would bees mourn, would crickets keen, drawing long

blue chords on their thighs like cellists?
Say you disperse like petals on the wind,
the bright stem of you still a living stroke

in memory, still green, still spring, still the tint
and the tang of you in my throat, unconsumed.

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Here's one that was published in The Eleventh Muse in 2005.


Sky in the Pie

Two sure cuts open the crust
and release a rush of dark thrushes
with golden beaks, heralding an arc of stars
borne on a rainbow. The spectrum flexes
like muscle, then settles in a single depth
of colour, blue as the powdered lapis
on a manuscript page in a rich book
of hours, blue as a dunnock's egg, blue
as distance. Take your spoon before
it elopes with the knife, and taste.

The clouds melt on your tongue
and sweeten your throat. You can chant
this day across the meadows, and call the lost flocks
home. The sheep and the chestnut cows. The dappled deer
and wild black horses. The wolves and small quick foxes.
All the lost beasts of your kingdom.
Call them home.

.
.

[David Rosenthal]

Wow. What a shock. Not Maz?

[David Rosenthal]

A couple of interviews (with good selections of poems after each):

http://www.poets.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16688, which contains:

I feel I am here under false pretenses, as I don't regard myself as a poet, merely as someone who tries to write poems, so my status is definitely: Still Learning Hard.

http://www.poetrykit.org/pkl/featurpoet/grasshop.htm, which contains:

Why do you write poetry?

I don't know. All I know is that I can't stop writing it. I think I'm a junkie.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

I hope that with all my poems, whatever else I am trying to communicate, I will communicate some of my delight in language and the magic of words. If pressed,I will admit that I wish I could write a poem that would make everyone really respect the world and all our fellow travellers, whatever their species.

David R.

[Michael Cantor]

I am shocked and saddened. Maz was one of the finest who posted here. She had her own particular voice, it was unique, and it was marvelous.

[Gene Auprey]

I am very saddened to hear this news, she was such a talented poet and thoughtful editor. Her zine was my first publishing credit. I will miss her and her and her always encouraging presence on the boards.

[Susan McLean]

This is a shock. Online, when someone isn't heard of for a while, you tend to assume he or she is just busy elsewhere, unless you hear otherwise. I admired her work very much, and she was an asset to Eratosphere whenever she appeared here. It is terrible to think that many of her poems may be lost on an unreadable disk.

Susan

It's frustrating that so many of her poems are (AFAIK) unpublished, which makes posting them questionable.

How do we find out who inherits copyright? Maz's poems must not be allowed to disappear. They must be collected and published.

[Rose Kelleher]

Maryann's looking into it.

I have some of her unpublished ones, but I'm sure there were hundreds more.

[Julie Steiner]

Such a talent! And such helpful critiques of others' work, too. I always treasured what she had to say, on my own and other threads, because her advice was always both intelligent and good-hearted. That good-heartedness was always obvious under the sass and vinegar and strong opinions that made her so much fun to argue with.

Here's "The Duke A-Hunting", from one of our Sonnet Bake-Offs:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=5619

I'm still a-hunting for my favorite of hers, the chilling sonnet with the conquering lord disposing of the conquered one's daughters along with his hawks and other property.

[Edited to say: OH MY GOODNESS, I forgot about this one, "Visiting the Surgical Ward", which is ACTUALLY my favorite sonnet of hers!

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=5608

But I'll keep looking for the other one I mentioned.]

[Edited to say: HA! Found it! It's "Aftermath":

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=5642

I still like "Visiting the Surgical Ward" better, but only by the tiniest bit...sigh, again, what a talent...I'm proud to have known her, even if only via Erato.]

[Edited again to say--okay, now I see that Rose already posted links to most of these above, but I enjoyed the hunt anyway.]

[Janet Kenny]

Maz was one of several editors of The Worm.

I never sent her poems because The Worm seemed so like an email but is that a good place to start? Who else was a contact?