“Tied or Untethered”: Carol Parris Krauss’ Review of World on a String by Gail Mazur
World on a String
Gail Mazur
Arrowsmith Press, October 2025
60 Pages
Some strings hum when the wind passes through their fibers, some sit silently still. We spend our lives becoming spiders or prey, weaving or catching, never sure which knot is loose and which has been tied while we are sleeping. Gail Mazur’s latest book of poetry, World on a String, gifts the readers with candid but kind verses of life depicted as a fragile, strong, unpredictable string.
Cambridge's influential literary figure, Mazur, returns with a new book from Arrowsmith Press. Some of her other celebrated works include Nightfire (1978), The Common (1995), and Forbidden City (2020). Her latest book grabs readers with poems such as the robust second one, “Couplets,” where she alludes to the quandary of many seasoned couples–
“Sometimes you're painting the dogwood in the yard,
Sometimes I call out to you but I’m not heard.”
Only to end the poem with the paradoxical couplet–
“When we’re together, it’s never too cold or too hot,
But one of us grows older, the other, not. “
The poem captures the tender disconnect of long-term marriages and relationships, where companionship and solitude coexist. Mazur never judges these contradictions; she observes them with the patience of someone who understands that love contains multitudes. Indeed, the complexity of relationships is defined in the last two short lines. Or approximately the measure of two inches of strong twine.
An alternating pattern of braiding and fraying continues throughout the rest of the collection– breaking down and building up life and all its components. In “After Pastor Al,” she goes to the woods to learn a new alphabet, to find change. She wants to know the words of the berries, the dialect of the path to the lake, and all of “nature's antique vernaculars.” She can only become at home in the words once she understands the language. In the short, poignant “Then, Now,” Mazur reflects on how far we carry our baggage. The journeys we take, our unexpected stops, and how she rides the train wherever it goes and rests her head on her partner’s shoulder.”
“then, as the day’s brief light faded
we arrived here at the place
that for so long seemed a distant station. “
She reflects on this trip to the woods and the train rides we take in life with an eye for detailed imagery and a tendency to bring the reader to consider what language they want to learn to change, and who will ride their journey with them and their “homely baggage.”
I have been reading Mazur since college. In “Low Tide,” I find myself. I, too, grew up on the water and took delight in her walk along the flats, seeking something to do and finding reflection on the tides' predictability. She ponders her early life on the river–a water thread. Enjoys creatures traversing the shore, dipping into the tidal pools, and a sighting of her friend Marian. The two of them take time to enjoy peace on a deck at the ocean’s lip.
Mazur’s World on a String is born of strings of love, loss, doubt, confidence, questions, and sometimes peace. A wondering of who we are and how we got where we are. A judgment-free zone to explore her world, your world, and then she questions every piece of those entities in a lush, lyrical language.
Carol Parris Krauss is honored to have published poetry in Louisiana Lit, the Arkansas Review, Salvation South, Eclectica, One Art, Story South, The South Carolina Review, and the Mid/South Sonnet Anthology, among others. Fernwood Press published her full-length book (Mountain.Memory.Marsh.) in November of 2025. Carol was born in S.C., to mystical mountain people, raised in NC, and attended Clemson University. She currently lives in Virginia with her St. Bernard, Martha June.