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Review by off the Shelf correspondent Dennis Daly

Internalized reality and memory need inspired, mindful editing to reach their fated shape of first-rate poetry. Ben Mazer showcases his skills as the genre’s perfect (or, at least, near-perfect) editor in his new book, The Ruined Millionaire. Somehow, in the evident density of Mazer’s work, his mirrored image metaphorically seems to appear distributing versified handbills that alert his already captured audience to the celebration of self-consciousness unquestionably underway. Oxidized word-bronzes and broken shards of stained-glass history are reinvigorated by this poet into contemporary, albeit runic, measures. Here the mind’s suzerainty is never in doubt. And Mazer is nothing if not the self-conscious observer of his own cognizant creations.

Opening the collection, Mazer’s poem The Double dives right into the soup of human imagination. In this universe intent weighs as much as action and time is a function of memory, not the reverse. Distance walks with one, mimicking motion. The poet plays with creation and not everyone appreciates it,

The Ruined Millionaire
By Ben Mazer
MadHat Press
Cheshire, MA
www.MadHat-Press.com
ISBN 978-1-952335-55-6
103 Pages – $21.95

… I remember red gray green blue brown brick
before rain or during rain. One doesn’t see who is going by,
One doesn’t think to see who is going by.
One sees who is going by all right, but one doesn’t see who is
going by.
The bright lights attract customers to the bookstore.
Seeing, chalk it up to that. The bitter looks of the booksellers,
as you leave the shop without paying. Rickety steps that will
soon
be history.

In his piece entitled The Exile, Mazer visits a dreamworld that has solidified into another kind of reality. He moseys around, reconnecting things again into a logic of place, the new overwriting the old, updates added, and lastly, a climatic stimulation of consciousness, in other words, a final edit,

… Coffee is birth.
I was surprised to see how things had changed
since I first dreamed I came here long ago.
The villagers were lobbying new plans,
who had been immigrants before the snow.
I was among the first to try the new
cuisine, the classless restaurant.
In the best house I recognized my host,
and he who had fulfilled a noble life
exhibited no need for conversation.
Then I was swept up in the exultation
Of thousands of revelers’ descent to hell.

There is a lot to see in Mazer’s new world of edited imagination. “Start with the rain,” he says in his fascinating piece entitled The Rain. Indeed, the elemental drumming upon the eaves suggest the consciousness awakening with a new awareness of life’s mysteries. Yes, mankind is different. He sees things and remembers what he needs or he wants to. The poet seems to use rain in the classic way, as a rebirthing force. But Mazer rebirths everything as his own personal universe and in his own image (poetically and internally) from which he continues to slice and dice. Consider these ruminations on man’s purpose,

The streets are slick with memory’s reflections,
the many byways of the mind’s directions,
wet thick on brick,
where nothing in its mystery shall stick,
affording a proper end to introspection
that have no name, where no two are the same,
except in the unity of your dissections,
the fame of eternity’s ejections.
Mankind is sick.
And comes up against naught but stone and brick,
not certain what there is he should atone for.
He’s quite insane, yet know him by his name
and you shall know the most and least of pain,
the trouble he has opening the door.
What stretches forward, and what comes before.
There is nothing holding you together,
except the windy and rainy weather.

Isolation and lost love coalesce in Mazer’s title poem, The Ruined Millionaire. The poet mines these emotions by chipping away at memory’s marble blocks and refashioning a memory of himself. His command over his imagined material appears childlike, most assuredly innocent, but his awareness and experience borders on omniscient. Here is the heart of the poem,

…He does things on a whim,
like take out childhood letters for an evening,
despite the fact his loneliness is grieving
for company that never comes. Who They?
No one gets inside. No one can say
what makes him tick. He lights a parlour trick
by rote, as if the moon were doing it,
but there is no audience, none can complain
he took a turn and willfully insane
made silent inventory of his pain,
his need for utterance still unfulfilled,
reminders of the time that he first killed.
Control is his. Considers History,
and sees that through a century or three
the ways of doing things have little changed.

Under the title of Lexington, Mazer composes in pointillist fashion, cinematic tapestries of remembered images bleeding together, a perception that must be seen from afar. This poem of leisure and wealth brings with it a dystopian undercurrent and intensities such as diseases, assault, and love’s debris kept at bay. Mazer strings together knowledge and nuggets of solidified consciousness. Here he details (picking and choosing, as a good editor should) mnemonic items charged with the raw material of poetry,

In the cellar theatrical properties
and paintings, trunks, of costume jewels,
pirate treasure, and men’s magazines.
Nothing endears the mind except truth.
I am still amazed at all that passion
growing daily, planned like a tea party.
In youth I fell in love with the old movies
and disappeared like Ahab in the screen,
The Son of the Shiek with Rudolph Valentino
gave fevered distance to the afternoon,
its byways and coursings palpable only in the breach,
the stock market, the rare book store, out of reach

Perhaps Mazer delivers his fevered visions of memorious wreckage uniquely and authentically because he has invented a new self from the remains. His editorial consciousness chisels out a mimetic unity which beautifies all that matters in poetic diction and structure. This collection represents the very best of Mazer. And the very best of Mazer is very good indeed.