Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award
Gathered here is a half century's magnificent work by the former poet
laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting
and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American
poets.
Beginning with the limited-edition volume Sleeping with One Eye Open,
published in 1964, Mark Strand was hailed as a poet of piercing
originality and elegance, and in the ensuing decades he has not swerved
from his vision of how a poem should be shaped and what it should
deliver. As he entered the middle period of his career, with volumes
such as The Continuous Life (1990), Strand was already well-known for
his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for
creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner
self: "And here the dark infinitive to feel, / Which would endure and
have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the
mountains / Into the hissing fields and silent towns." In his later
work, from Blizzard of One (1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize,
through the sly, provocative riddles of his recent Almost Invisible
(2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite
like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom and
self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with
a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace
Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.
