Interesting Times

About the Book

Interesting Times explores efforts to confront the complexities of contemporary life at times with humor, as in “Florida”, at other times, as in “Irene”, with resolve, “having sunk roots so deep hope’s possible,” and at all times, with the knowledge that “we’re nature, too.” Herbert A. Kenney said of his work that Mazzaro “writes powerfully of passing time, the erosion of things and persons and emotions, and the growth of man that comes from suffering sensed and shared,” and Richard Emil Braun that his “voice, no less than his vision, withstands distortion, the timbre same and measure same in utterance and meditation” and describes it as “high and strong as a caller’s ‘promenade home.’” Robert Peters writes that the voice “insists on the traditional iambic pentameter line (the purely free-verse lyric being rare), on verse sentence structures that echo the elegance of Georgian and Victorian verse and on diction that provides conscious spots of beauty and elegiac adornments,” and in The New York Times, Joseph Bennett called it “dignified, elegant, meaningful, and manly.” Reviewing Weathering the Changes, Daniela Gioseffi finds that “Mazzaro is worth the reading if one wants to recapture what poetic craft can really do for the ear and the heart as well as the seasoned mind,” and Robert Phillips that “Mazzaro is an American poet who should be better known.”

About the Author

Jerome Mazzaro was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1934, and for the most part of his academic career, he was Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He retired from teaching in 1996, having also been a Visiting Professor at California State College at San Diego (1978) and Bennington College, where he was Hadley Fellow (1979-80). A graduate of Wayne State University (A.B., 1954 and PhD., 1963) and the University of Iowa Creative Writing Program (M.A. 1956), he was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1964. His books include five previous volumes of poetry, Changing the Windows (1966), The Caves of Love (1985), Rubbings (1985), Weathering the Changes (2002), and Dream Catchers (2008) as well as a verse translation of Juvenal’s Satires (1965). In addition to appearing in numerous magazines and journals, his poems have been included in The New York Times Book of Verse, ed. Thomas Lask (1970), American Poets in 1976, ed. William Heyen (1976), 50 Contemporary Poets, ed. Alberta T. Turner (1977), and From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, eds. Anthony Tamburri, Paolo Giordano, and Fred Gardaphé (1991). He has also published studies on Robert Lowell, the Renaissance English Lyric, William Carlos Williams, Luigi Pirandello, and Dante, and edited a number of works on contemporary poets and poetry.