Customer Reviews

New Selected Poems

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Poets and artists usually create their most significant work early in their career. Perhaps I never warmed to Strand's poetry in the past because I never had the chance to read enough of the early poems. Even his book-length poem "The Dark Harbor" didn't convince me nor his Pulitzer-winning collection "Blizzard of One". Could never figure out why he was named Poet Laureate. This New Selected Poems by Mark Strand arrives twenty-five years after his last Selected and explains everything. It is a most impressive introduction to a significant poet. The poems from the early books are typically dark and mysterious; they breathe a natural surrealism that is as different from Lorca's manner as the New World is from the Old. And this mystery is couched in short lyrics composed of short lines packed with powerful Anglo-Saxon nouns and verbs. Half-rhymes and assonance add welcome music to the atmosphere of each poem. Strand's mastery of informal formality is made to seem deceptively easy but, as any experienced poet knows, is almost impossible to teach in a poetry workshop. Here in its entirety is "The Prediction", a great poem from his third book (1970):

That night the moon drifted over the pond,
turning the water to milk, and under
the boughs of the trees, the blue trees,
a young woman walked, and for an instant

the future came to her:
rain falling on her husband's grave, rain falling
on the lawns of her children, her own mouth
filling with cold air, strangers moving into her house,

a man in her room writing a poem, the moon drifting into it,
a woman strolling under its trees, thinking of death,
thinking of him thinking of her, and the wind rising
and taking the moon and leaving the paper dark.
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Pure magic; it makes me want to break every pencil and pen in my house. There are plenty of other poems in Strand's Selected of this quality; they have that quick inevitable click that Dickinson has. Enough said.

Strand's most recent collection provides a compelling selection of his brilliant poetry. The poems develop a haunting sense of a world ready to crack but one that is held together by the moral and aesthetic force of Strand's imagination. Some of the poems are puzzlers; most are the kind you want to read aloud to someone near you.

I purchased this collection of Strand's poetry after reading a review in the New Yorker Magazine which also reviewed a new release of Robert Hass's works. Strand's poems are beautiful and thought provoking. He has a way of using words that I've never experienced before. One of my favorites, "Moontan," takes me away to a distant place that rings familiar. The same would be true with "The Good Life," which make me think about how short and unpredictable life is. I would recommend this book highly to those who love poetry or to those for whom this might be their first purchase of a book of poems. Strand is one of the great American poets. Nothing quite like curling up in an over stuffed leather chair in front of a fireplace with a glass of port and reading these poems while Bach's Cello Suites play in the background.