Forged by Joy

Recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize Laura Mazza-Dixons Forged by Joyis a test of light against time from innocence to loss a spiritual autobiography seen first through a girls eyes that behold wonder in everything including stones - sea-polished ovals green trapezoids laced with gold - and forged through a life of art and love and loss arriving at the question Can joy weigh more than grief? These are graceful softly cadenced poems of belief carried against the final darkness we all face. Doug Anderson poet and author of Blues for Unemployed Secret PoliceOf the book Forged by Joy poet Tryfon Tolides winner of the National Book Award for Poetry and author of An Almost Pure Empty Walking writes Through elegies litanies gardening poems and poems about other artists and musicians Laura Mazza-Dixon weaves a community extending far Her yarns are her memories her knowledge her living and her dead. She draws her own design of what a family tree might look like. In addition to relatives her tree contains friends and people shes never met such as the composers Arvo Pärt (who sought solace / in silence) and J.S. Bach various writers and artists and her readers. Art and joy balance what is painful and dark. All of it - beauty joy grief death - is encompassed by grandeur.She learns of her life and records the lessons. Her community extends to us who share the truth of experience described. She tells us of her grandmother and her puzzlement and grief over the distance/ betwen herself and her only sister. We know these pains. Referencing music she says truth comes to us all/ in the same way/ riding on the interval of a minor second.There are beautiful simple resonant details: in the room/ where the lights came through the venetian blinds/ and crawled up the wall when the big truck climbed the hill. She recalls the texture of days and her father on the pitchers mound with your weight on one leg or snow melting down the slope/ of the broad hill. In New Years Day The year is off/ to a slow beginning.// A day of steady rain and small tasks. In the poem Mazza-Dixon imagines Bach walking [h]is head down / his shoulders stooped / lost in thought as she listens to one of his compositions. The posture repeats in Chaucers Nephew whose habit of listening/ as he walked alongside/ the other pilgrims / his head down eyes on the path made it possible for him/ to observe them privily.There are no shortcuts in her plain methodical artful approach to writing and to honoring the lives of others and discovering more about her own. She gets there by an honest deliberation and poetry by learning and having learned to wait by listening which is the refrain in the collections last poem Rondo for Wood Thrush and Salamander.How does she work? Just as her brothers grave was dug by her father and brothers and just as her garden was dug by her Laura Mazza-Dixons poems are dug by hand. No fancy machines do the work but the presence of a mature attention and time taken to be with things and the lives of others and with the poems. This quality of attentiveness and patience is our only way of understanding anything. In a world and an age where we fling more at each other than listen Mazza-Dixon shows us what taking time is. We learn by following the ways and delights of her poems. And we too can be grateful.