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.