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There is a terrible atmosphere of finality and doom to these poems. In two splendid villanelles, for example, Strand pays homage to De Chirico, and the tension of lines like these brings with it a strange shiver of pleasure:
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.Strand continues to acknowledge his debt to Wallace Stevens, while taking the impulse to a further level of abstraction: "Even now we seem to be waiting / For something whose appearance would be its vanishing." Yet he can also deal lightly and self-mockingly with serious concerns: "Now that the great dog I worshipped for years / Has become none other than myself, I can look within / And bark, and I can look at the mountains down the street / And bark at them as well...." No poet has been able to make more out of a minimalist aesthetic than Mark Strand. He strives for elegance and masterful brevity, and whether he's working his ominous or light-fingered register, his formalism is never precious, always an agent of necessity. --Mark Rudman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
One tries to brush it off. It only grows.
Something about the silence of the square.
Something is wrong; something about the air,
Its color; about the light, the way it glows.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
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