Strand's poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the
sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice
that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime.
The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking," but they are
also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of
time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration.
This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism
and wit. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Blizzard of
One is an extraordinary book--the summation of the work of a lifetime
by one of our very few true masters of the art of poetry.