Bodies of Time and Space

It is rare to read a poet of such sensuous exuberance and happiness. Gently philosophical, Bodies of Time and Space celebrates the cosmic intimacy of matter and movement, sounds and silence, plants and planets, animal nature and human love. We are not alone; the earth is inside of us. Although Mazis does not shrink from painful memories, although as a species, humans in this book are self-absorbed, greedy, and arrogant, the natural world and its myriad glorious inhabitants-bees, bears, seals, salamanders, wolfs, worms, birds, and turtles-come to rest "within the soundless circle that is wider than any collection / of words or sounds from which they borrow their heart." In Mazis' stunningly insightful phrase, words and sounds only lend us our hearts, for we are all ultimately gathered into a soundless circle, the sanctuary of the "quiet we dream." While a "cosmic calligrapher" writes the universe, the poet merely dreams the "tiny cerulean dreams" of lovers. But in this extraordinary book, the tiny is vast and deep. Glen Mazis' Bodies of Time and Space is profoundly moving, beautiful, and wise.

-Harold Schweizer, author of On Waiting and On Lingering and Literature

It would take a poet of Glen Mazis' immense sensibility to understand that the water
in our bodies came from collisions between the Earth and a vast array of comets millions
of years ago, and that even now, traveling 6000 miles an hour around the sun, we are
balanced on tectonic plates that are floating on lava as we surf through the universe.
These poems have that same gravitational pull and know that the "abandoned hives"
of the earth's many bodies are where "the earth's creatures lie." These poems are filled
with tender, unflinching, hard-won moments, and they rub their legs against the edifice
of our ruins. But they do more than that. They are woven with notes of hopefulness and
build bridges into the landscapes of our shared interior lives, our tribal DNA. It is no
coincidence that the human body and the Earth's skin are both composed of the same ratio
of water, and this tight, resonant collection is filled with lines that ebb and flow like the tides, folding their themes over into the reader's taut subconscious and foaming with quiet surprises over and over. "A mother is the curve of the earth," he writes, "a steady hold on who we are." Mazis knows that History is filled with astonishments, like the ninth configuration of protein molecules that caused the first life on the planet to bubble forth. The poems in Bodies of Time and Space are like a toy car, pull them into your body and they leap forward twice as far.

-Keith Flynn, author of The Skin of Meaning and editor of The Asheville Poetry Review