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The Continuous Life
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.
- GenresPoetry
63 pages, Paperback
First published September 26, 1990
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About the author
Mark Strand
181 books267 followersMark Strand was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. He was a professor of English at Columbia University and also taught at numerous other colleges and universities.
Strand also wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies and translated Spanish poet Rafael Alberti.
He is survived by a son, a daughter and a sister.
Strand also wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies and translated Spanish poet Rafael Alberti.
He is survived by a son, a daughter and a sister.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
January 18, 2017
And though it was brief, and slight, and nothing
To have been held onto so long, I remember it,
As if it had come from within, one of the scenes
The mind sets for itself, night after night, only
To part from, quickly and without warning.
To have been held onto so long, I remember it,
As if it had come from within, one of the scenes
The mind sets for itself, night after night, only
To part from, quickly and without warning.
October 13, 2021
When victoria.p shared "The Continuous Life" as part of National Poetry Month, I was surprised there was a Mark Strand poem out there I hadn't known to love. I immediately looked into buying the book it came from, learned the poem was in a volume also called The Continuous Life and that, furthermore, I already had a copy sitting behind me on my bookshelf. It's a used copy, bought while I was in college, and the cover is mangled. Someone marked up the first five poems, spilled coffee on the sixth, and didn't touch the rest. Except, as I found when I went to turn the page, for dogearing the corner of "The Continuous Life," which gave me a sense of rightness because it's the best poem in the book.
I love Mark Strand for his transparency, whimsy, and the way he approaches storytelling. Those elements get a little unbalanced in this volume and not all employ his usual plain-spoken language. There are a number of prose poems in here, and as a poet myself I've always been suspicious of prose poems because the only thing that makes them a poem is the author's word. Strand's are several pages long and read more like short, mostly absurdist, stories. "Narrative Poetry" is about writing poetry and is so self-referential it actually made me angry. "Two Letters" is straight up Metamorphosis fanfiction as is, I assume, "Chekhov: A Sestina," but "From a Lost Diary" reads like it was written from inside an oil painting, lush and full of descriptive landscapes, and I liked the ideas presented in "Translation" as that's a topic I'm very interested in, but I could have done without the gratuitous naked ladies, which is a problem throughout. If you're going to use the word "pudendum" anywhere I can see it, I'm gonna have to see some ID.
Other favorites, in addition to "The Continuous Life" are: "Fiction," "Luminism," "Life in the Valley," and "The End." Most of those are about a certain kind of landscape filled with a certain kind of light and the lone man or couple able to witness it, record it in some way, and incorporate that fleeting, fragile, short-lived beauty into the context of their mundane, humble, and perhaps increasingly finite, life.
I love Mark Strand for his transparency, whimsy, and the way he approaches storytelling. Those elements get a little unbalanced in this volume and not all employ his usual plain-spoken language. There are a number of prose poems in here, and as a poet myself I've always been suspicious of prose poems because the only thing that makes them a poem is the author's word. Strand's are several pages long and read more like short, mostly absurdist, stories. "Narrative Poetry" is about writing poetry and is so self-referential it actually made me angry. "Two Letters" is straight up Metamorphosis fanfiction as is, I assume, "Chekhov: A Sestina," but "From a Lost Diary" reads like it was written from inside an oil painting, lush and full of descriptive landscapes, and I liked the ideas presented in "Translation" as that's a topic I'm very interested in, but I could have done without the gratuitous naked ladies, which is a problem throughout. If you're going to use the word "pudendum" anywhere I can see it, I'm gonna have to see some ID.
Other favorites, in addition to "The Continuous Life" are: "Fiction," "Luminism," "Life in the Valley," and "The End." Most of those are about a certain kind of landscape filled with a certain kind of light and the lone man or couple able to witness it, record it in some way, and incorporate that fleeting, fragile, short-lived beauty into the context of their mundane, humble, and perhaps increasingly finite, life.
December 6, 2014
A thoughtful, evocative book whose opening poems often take my breath away. Strand understood that all attainments are ultimately lost. That may seem depressing, but for me such a level look at our vanity to accumulate honors, materials, and certainty was refreshing when I first read these poems in 1999, upon returning from 2 years of living in a remote village in Benin. That was life stripped to its barest. No hiding that there was no clean water just 2 months into a 5-month dry season, no hiding ailments in hospitals. The sick and dying, of all ages, were among us. Strand's poems gave me great comfort when I came home to the United States and found myself a foreigner in a culture obsessed with youth, possession, corporate packaging, irony, and nostalgia for a purer America. In these poems, Strand shows compassion toward our desire to cling to life and what it offers but tells us at the same time that these things are not really ours, if they ever were, and will be taken.
May 17, 2024
"Do we not, if we are lucky, live many lives, assume many masks, and, with death always imminent, do we not keep hoping to be reborn? This is the human condition. We are citizens of one world only when we apply to the next; we are perpetual exiles, living outside of what is possible, creating for ourselves the terms of our exclusion, yet hoping to overcome them. Our misery and our happiness are inextricable."
If I had to pin down a single theme from this collection, it would be existentialism. Most of the poems have something to do with existence or the human condition. There is also a surrealist quality to the work, but not Dali surrealism, more like Magritte. The pieces themselves are as diverse as they are eclectic, but Strand seems to master any style he tasks himself with. The tone (if not surreal) is one of a beautiful sadness. The handful of poems on the topics of poetry or translation are wildly entertaining and incredibly intelligent.
Observant, thoughtful, poignant. The scope, range, and talent are all worthy of 5 stars.
If I had to pin down a single theme from this collection, it would be existentialism. Most of the poems have something to do with existence or the human condition. There is also a surrealist quality to the work, but not Dali surrealism, more like Magritte. The pieces themselves are as diverse as they are eclectic, but Strand seems to master any style he tasks himself with. The tone (if not surreal) is one of a beautiful sadness. The handful of poems on the topics of poetry or translation are wildly entertaining and incredibly intelligent.
Observant, thoughtful, poignant. The scope, range, and talent are all worthy of 5 stars.
August 14, 2019
Is Strand just really good company at writers’ retreats? For the life of me, I can’t figure out why Strand is such a decorated poet, one who evidently has the respect of his peers.
August 25, 2023
“Our friends would say the views—starlight over
The clustered domes and towers, the frigid moon
In the water’s glass—were great…”
(Life in the Valley)
I am looking at the painting that graces the cover of this slender book of poems by Mark Strand. The painting is called “Timber Top” by Wayne Thiebaud. Its an abstracted view full of expressive colour of a dome or rock tower, familiar landmarks of the American southwest. The sun catches the one side bathing it in yellow light while the crags reflect the deep shadows of the large mass of stone.
One can say the same about the 30 poems in this collection. The title poem, “The Continuous Life” is about the everyday mundane. The everyday seems to run through all of the poems with a degree of light and dark.
On the lighter side, there is the reflection on the lives of people in novels (Fiction), on love in a Chekhov story (Chekhov: A Sestina) or the narrator who can’t place where he fell in love with a woman because of so much travelling (Travel).
On the dark side, there is a very strange poem that starts with a hunchback, a king and two strangers looking for love (Grotesque), Orpheus contemplating what he lost (Orpheus Alone), and Alcetus and Melissus contemplating a dream about a falling moon versus falling stars (Fear of the Night).
My favourites are two of the longer poems. “Narrative Poetry” begins with the narrator overhearing a conversation between a man and woman discussing narrative poetry in the supermarket. He goes home and tells his sister and they continue the dialogue on narrative poetry, the pros and cons. Then his mother calls and the conversation continues. Yep, an absurdist idea told as a narrative poem.
Speaking of absurd, in “Translation” the narrator’s four year old son announces that “My translations of Palazzeschi are going poorly.” Then the narrator is confronted by his son’s nursery school teacher, who while undressing in the classroom (an allusion to laying oneself bare or straight forward sleeze?) admits her German translation is not good enough for Rilke. The narrator runs into the nursery school teacher’s husband on the street and then meets a man called Bob while camping, both of whom share their challenging issues on translation. The narrator throughout offers his advice. Finally out of frustration, the narrator goes home and a takes a bath. While pondering these translation issues, Borges himself stops by to offer some advice. I learned on the bio that Mark Strand himself has done translation work. Now I can see these dilemmas.
Surrealism of the every day one might say. However the one that really jumps off the page is the poem “Always.” A group of “great forgetters” are erasing the world. All that is left is “the blaze of promise everywhere.” A poem on memory? New beginnings? Forget the past?
A tidy but complete book of poems read in an afternoon. Still pondering that Thiebaud painting on the cover.
The clustered domes and towers, the frigid moon
In the water’s glass—were great…”
(Life in the Valley)
I am looking at the painting that graces the cover of this slender book of poems by Mark Strand. The painting is called “Timber Top” by Wayne Thiebaud. Its an abstracted view full of expressive colour of a dome or rock tower, familiar landmarks of the American southwest. The sun catches the one side bathing it in yellow light while the crags reflect the deep shadows of the large mass of stone.
One can say the same about the 30 poems in this collection. The title poem, “The Continuous Life” is about the everyday mundane. The everyday seems to run through all of the poems with a degree of light and dark.
On the lighter side, there is the reflection on the lives of people in novels (Fiction), on love in a Chekhov story (Chekhov: A Sestina) or the narrator who can’t place where he fell in love with a woman because of so much travelling (Travel).
On the dark side, there is a very strange poem that starts with a hunchback, a king and two strangers looking for love (Grotesque), Orpheus contemplating what he lost (Orpheus Alone), and Alcetus and Melissus contemplating a dream about a falling moon versus falling stars (Fear of the Night).
My favourites are two of the longer poems. “Narrative Poetry” begins with the narrator overhearing a conversation between a man and woman discussing narrative poetry in the supermarket. He goes home and tells his sister and they continue the dialogue on narrative poetry, the pros and cons. Then his mother calls and the conversation continues. Yep, an absurdist idea told as a narrative poem.
Speaking of absurd, in “Translation” the narrator’s four year old son announces that “My translations of Palazzeschi are going poorly.” Then the narrator is confronted by his son’s nursery school teacher, who while undressing in the classroom (an allusion to laying oneself bare or straight forward sleeze?) admits her German translation is not good enough for Rilke. The narrator runs into the nursery school teacher’s husband on the street and then meets a man called Bob while camping, both of whom share their challenging issues on translation. The narrator throughout offers his advice. Finally out of frustration, the narrator goes home and a takes a bath. While pondering these translation issues, Borges himself stops by to offer some advice. I learned on the bio that Mark Strand himself has done translation work. Now I can see these dilemmas.
Surrealism of the every day one might say. However the one that really jumps off the page is the poem “Always.” A group of “great forgetters” are erasing the world. All that is left is “the blaze of promise everywhere.” A poem on memory? New beginnings? Forget the past?
A tidy but complete book of poems read in an afternoon. Still pondering that Thiebaud painting on the cover.
December 6, 2023
“So much is adrift in the ever-opening rooms of elsewhere”
July 16, 2024
Not my favorite Strand.
October 20, 2012
My latest read was Mark Strand's The Continuous Life, which he released in 1990 and which apparently was his first book of poetry in ten years. Strand is unarguably a current godfather of American poetry, and a quick search for commentary on this book demonstrates that he's widely respected. Yet, oddly, he seems to seldom come across the lips of poets I know as one of their short list favorites. Do I know the wrong poets? Do we just take Strand for granted? Is he just a bit out of vogue? It's hard to say, but this book, although not really my introduction to him, marks the first time I can remember reading a volume of his work cover to cover.
In short, I liked it. Many of the poems struck me with the way they pushed up against meaning but often refrained from jumping into the middle of it. Some critics note his surrealist tendencies; one critic, to paraphrase, said Strand walks the realm between dream and wakefulness (this is the comment that comes closest to my own impressions). And one comment, repeated endlessly in internet commentaries, referred to the title piece as a perfect poem. You can read the poem here.
So what might make this a perfect poem? "The Continuous Life" is, indeed, a beautiful poem. It strikes a lovely balance between intimacy and didacticism, between realism and romanticism. The parents whom the speaker addresses are familiar, and their simultaneously banal and glorious lives are very familiar. The hope is present that there is something more to all our lives, but perhaps more present is the fear that there isn't at all, that we are daily living the sums of our existence. Still, somehow it offers comfort that this too is beautiful, if that comfort is what you seek (although I also suspect it could work the other way, leaving a reader with a sense of bleak hopelessness--this is the ambiguity of meaning I spoke of earlier). And, of course, this is the underlying tension of poems as old as language itself, set in a contemporary time with contemporary manifestations.
Is it the language? The diction from the beginning is slightly elevated, just enough to let us know that the speaker is a touch outside of the scenario which he describes. But the speaker doesn't come off as pompous, exactly; rather, he seems to have great and complicated tenderness for both the parents and the children of his poem. The sounds of the poem are correspondingly complex, coming to their most "poetic" registers in those last six lines which pull in the overlying abstract questions-- the conventions of the poem support each other. But the perfect poem? An interesting claim...
But for me, this poem only gains in richness by the company it keeps. Other poems in this collection, particularly "The Idea," "Luminism," "The Famous Scene," and "Reading in Place," in my mind, accumulate and focus the themes found in this one. I can't say if "The Continuous Life" would have made the same impression on me without the others. This isn't even to mention the remaining bulk of the collection, which included everything from dry and funny prose poems to deeply personal introspections of a sort. It was a pleasure to read, and a pleasure to stroll with Mr. Strand for a while.
In short, I liked it. Many of the poems struck me with the way they pushed up against meaning but often refrained from jumping into the middle of it. Some critics note his surrealist tendencies; one critic, to paraphrase, said Strand walks the realm between dream and wakefulness (this is the comment that comes closest to my own impressions). And one comment, repeated endlessly in internet commentaries, referred to the title piece as a perfect poem. You can read the poem here.
So what might make this a perfect poem? "The Continuous Life" is, indeed, a beautiful poem. It strikes a lovely balance between intimacy and didacticism, between realism and romanticism. The parents whom the speaker addresses are familiar, and their simultaneously banal and glorious lives are very familiar. The hope is present that there is something more to all our lives, but perhaps more present is the fear that there isn't at all, that we are daily living the sums of our existence. Still, somehow it offers comfort that this too is beautiful, if that comfort is what you seek (although I also suspect it could work the other way, leaving a reader with a sense of bleak hopelessness--this is the ambiguity of meaning I spoke of earlier). And, of course, this is the underlying tension of poems as old as language itself, set in a contemporary time with contemporary manifestations.
Is it the language? The diction from the beginning is slightly elevated, just enough to let us know that the speaker is a touch outside of the scenario which he describes. But the speaker doesn't come off as pompous, exactly; rather, he seems to have great and complicated tenderness for both the parents and the children of his poem. The sounds of the poem are correspondingly complex, coming to their most "poetic" registers in those last six lines which pull in the overlying abstract questions-- the conventions of the poem support each other. But the perfect poem? An interesting claim...
But for me, this poem only gains in richness by the company it keeps. Other poems in this collection, particularly "The Idea," "Luminism," "The Famous Scene," and "Reading in Place," in my mind, accumulate and focus the themes found in this one. I can't say if "The Continuous Life" would have made the same impression on me without the others. This isn't even to mention the remaining bulk of the collection, which included everything from dry and funny prose poems to deeply personal introspections of a sort. It was a pleasure to read, and a pleasure to stroll with Mr. Strand for a while.
December 16, 2009
This early book of Mark Stand is a wonderful book of poems, a delight to read, humorous and full of insights!
Here are some quotes:
From his poem the book is named after, The Continuous Life:
“Explain that you live between two great darks, the forest
with an ending, the second without one,...
From a Lost Day:
“That I have withdrawn from the/abuses of time means little/or nothing. I am a place where/things come together, then/ fly apart.”
“There is so much not to do!”
“In many instances it is better and/kinder to write nothing than not to write.”
“A day like so many others, why do/anything about it? Why even write/ this down, were it not for my going on/record as not having lived. After all,/who can believe what is not written/down?”
From "Always," for Charles Simic:
“Always so later in the day
in their rumpled clothes, sitting
Around a table lit by a single bulb,
The great forgetters where hard at work.”
Grotesques
1. The Hunchback
Translation
4 year old polishing shoes Palazzeschi
“Son,” I said “you should find a
young poet to translate, someone
your own age, whose poems are no good.
Then, if your translations are bad, it
Won’t matter.”
3
“I have decided not to translate in
order to save my marriage,” he said.
“I teach Portuguese at Southern
Utah State where the need for
Portuguese is great since so few
People there seem to know it exists.”
“for in order to translate one must cease to be.”
From “The End”
“not everyman knows what he shall sing at the end”
“when the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky—
not everyman knows what is waiting for him or what he shall sing
when the ship he’s on slips into darkness, there at the end.”
Here are some quotes:
From his poem the book is named after, The Continuous Life:
“Explain that you live between two great darks, the forest
with an ending, the second without one,...
From a Lost Day:
“That I have withdrawn from the/abuses of time means little/or nothing. I am a place where/things come together, then/ fly apart.”
“There is so much not to do!”
“In many instances it is better and/kinder to write nothing than not to write.”
“A day like so many others, why do/anything about it? Why even write/ this down, were it not for my going on/record as not having lived. After all,/who can believe what is not written/down?”
From "Always," for Charles Simic:
“Always so later in the day
in their rumpled clothes, sitting
Around a table lit by a single bulb,
The great forgetters where hard at work.”
Grotesques
1. The Hunchback
Translation
4 year old polishing shoes Palazzeschi
“Son,” I said “you should find a
young poet to translate, someone
your own age, whose poems are no good.
Then, if your translations are bad, it
Won’t matter.”
3
“I have decided not to translate in
order to save my marriage,” he said.
“I teach Portuguese at Southern
Utah State where the need for
Portuguese is great since so few
People there seem to know it exists.”
“for in order to translate one must cease to be.”
From “The End”
“not everyman knows what he shall sing at the end”
“when the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky—
not everyman knows what is waiting for him or what he shall sing
when the ship he’s on slips into darkness, there at the end.”
December 15, 2009
Written while Mark Strand was teaching at University of Utah, The Continuous Life is a highly readable volume of poetry, taking for its theme both the unsaid and the unsayable. Strand's verse often functions as a platform to explore different perspectives on narrative, fiction, translation, memory, mythology, and autobiography, but I found myself drawn more to his straightforward style, which is stronger when he sets aside the deconstructionism and writes a good old fashioned confessional poem. Nevertheless, few poets move so seamlessly across this wide spectrum of rhetoric. I know I sound highblown (but he earns it). Mark Strand can be at once both Borges and Baudelaire, maintaining in both voices his own distinct, minimalist style. This volume comes with especially high marks for anyone interested in new ways to write about the basin and range region; though the poems are by no means confined to the West.
August 9, 2015
Every couple of years, I go back and re-read some of my books by Strand because he is so inspiring. This one in particular is so good I can barely describe it literately -- I dogear poems I like, and more than half this book is dogeared! He moves between the mythic and the personal extremely easily, as well as from colloquial language to the language of high art, sometimes in the same poem, effortlessly and without a hitch. This book is worth reading for "Orpheus Alone", and yes, you can find that one online, but if you like that, you'll love all of this. I also love his frequently surreal settings and dry wit. Just when you think you might be able to guess what's coming next in his poems, there's always a surprise around the bend. Absolute genius.
September 18, 2009
Strand is one of my few favorite poets: he walks slowly through the mind and the heart.
October 8, 2009
Eh. I did not love this.
November 17, 2012
Some poetry you just relate to; other poetry you don't. This is the former.
March 1, 2015
I had checked out four of Mark Strand's poetry books, to get stimulated and inspired to start writing my own again. With that said, I enjoy his work, and it did the trick.
February 4, 2016
Well written, it just didn't speak to me.
July 28, 2009
hmph.
February 2, 2015
I dunno, not as exciting as usual, but Strand does manage some winners.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews