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Collected Poems of Mark Strand
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 “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.
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 “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.
- GenresPoetry
544 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
110 people are currently reading
721 people want to read
About the author
Mark Strand
181 books269 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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June 21, 2025
Poetry is an abstract art that brings essence into being, gives shape to formless ideas, and extracts the sweetness of days into words. ‘Once you start describing nothingness, you end up with somethingness,’ poet Mark Strand (1934—2014) once said in an interiew with the Paris Review, and the works of Mark Strand certainly create a magnificent “something” from the “nothingness” of everyday living. Collected Poems is a heavy-duty, hard-hitting tome of text that covers the former US Poet Laureate’s entire career, from his early work in his 1964 Sleeping With One Eye Open through Almost Invisible in 2012, and includes his brilliant, Pulitzer Prize winning Blizzard of One. Through a search for identity and meaning, Strand traverses surreal or dreamlike depictions of life and emotional states that defamiliarize reality in order to see more clearly into the philosophical underpinnings of existence. As critic David Kirby once wrote ‘the basic themes are treated in the poems with a growing unease that the reader feels more intensely than before,’ noting that over Strand’s career ‘as his skill increases, so does the poet’s power to disturb.’ A big brilliant collection to celebrate a lifetime of work, Collected Poems is a glorious read.
The Night, the Porch
To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be vanishing—
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf;
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.
Mark Strand crafted pristine prose that probed the ineffable and arranged words like signposts that pointed to the absences and loneliness of life. His poems reflect ‘the one clear place given to us when we are alone’, and these moments of clarity fill the unlit rooms of the soul with a bright light of beauty and empathy. Strand creates a poetic dialogue out of his tender and daring examinations of nothingness, giving voice to our silences, our awkward pauses, our feelings of loneliness, inadequacy and self-reflection. In a way we find that we are two sides of the same coin as nothingness, being the somethingness he spoke of while also the counterpart of our own negation.
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
We are reading the story of our lives / as though we were in it,’ Strand writes and much of his life filters in through his poems. And what a life as a decorated poet he lead. Born on the Price Edward Island in Canada to American parents, Strand came to Philadelphia at the age of four speaking little English and was ‘mocked and brutalized’ by his classmates for his thick French accent. Summers spent in Halifax brought him to the soul-bearing freedom of the wilderness which he ‘internalized.’ Much of this internalization is evident in his matured poetry, and the surreal introspection coupled with the eye for the beauty of the natural world makes one want to call his poetry the offspring of Charles Simic (with whom Strand was friends with beginning in the Sixties, with Simic having commented in his eulogy for Strand that Mark was fond of coming up with wild “get rich quick” schemes such as the time the two imported wine and sold them to students on campus) and Mary Oliver, though each poet is unique an inimitable in their own regard. I was particularly moved by his poems involving solitude and soul-searching while dwarfed by the wilderness, which dredged up precious sun-soaked memories of my own childhood summers spent wandering the dense woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a wonderment that I would suddenly stumble upon a fairy-tale epic adventure in the rich smelling overgrown foliage to match the stories that I had read or were currently writing in my head. These thoughts come alive through Strand’s poetry, such as this passage from Night at Hackett’s Cove :
Strand fully captures those moments of wishful thinking, late night longings and the blissful pains of loneliness that visit us all. There are moments that are outright tragic or of truth and faith being denied to you while they linger in the air just beyond grasp, and there are moments of utter beauty and empathy that make the reader cry out in joy for being felt—if only for a brief passing of lines—understood and not so alone in the world as once thought.
For Her
Let it be anywhere
on any night you wish,
in your room that is empty and dark
or down the street
or at those dim frontiers
you barely see, barely dream of.
You will not feel desire,
nothing will warn you,
no sudden wind, no stillness of air.
She will appear,
looking like someone you knew:
the friend who wasted her life,
the girl who sat under the palm tree.
Her bracelets will glitter,
becoming the lights
of a village you turned from years ago.
An aspect of Strand that I really enjoy is his fondness for surrealism and the way it comes through in his imagery. Strand has cited artists like Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Giorgio de Chirico amongst his influences and it really shows in the way he can make the abstract feel so tangible through his words. Strand is also fond of the comic poem, with many great playful works. One of his more famous, Eating Poetry , delivers a raucous joy for language and the art of being a poet, writing ‘Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. / There is no happiness like mine. / I have been eating poetry.’ How can one not have fun when the poet clearly is?
‘The sun setting. The lawns on fire
The lost day, the lost light.
Why do I love what fades?’
—from The Guardian
‘Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
/ When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end,’ Strand writes in The End and a preoccupation with death permeates many of his later collections. ‘I grow into my death,’ he states in My Life , adding that ‘My life is small / and getting smaller,’ in a way that harnesses his earlier examinations on identity and has progressed into an embrace of the self as something small yet still meaningful despite practically being meaningless in the grand scheme of eternity. But there is a lot of hope in this. ‘The story of the end, of the last word / Of the end, when told, is a story that never ends,’ he wrote in Poem After the Seven Last Words acknowledging that life goes on even after death, ‘the story / continues. So we continue. And the end, once more, / becomes the next, and the next after that.’ Strand may be gone, but through reading his words we keep him alive in our hearts and carry him with us. From this day to the next and the next after that.
Old Man Leaves the Party
It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection. The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking. I was like you once. But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?
Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mark Strand was a fantastic artist and Collected Poems is an essential collection of American poetry. A big book full of big ideas and beautiful imagery, I have long loved this book and often dive back into Strand’s works when I need a pick me up. Luminous, intelligent, and empathetic, this is a marvelous collection and a perfect testament to the great poet.
5/5
The Remains
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.
My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.
The Night, the Porch
To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be vanishing—
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf;
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.
Mark Strand crafted pristine prose that probed the ineffable and arranged words like signposts that pointed to the absences and loneliness of life. His poems reflect ‘the one clear place given to us when we are alone’, and these moments of clarity fill the unlit rooms of the soul with a bright light of beauty and empathy. Strand creates a poetic dialogue out of his tender and daring examinations of nothingness, giving voice to our silences, our awkward pauses, our feelings of loneliness, inadequacy and self-reflection. In a way we find that we are two sides of the same coin as nothingness, being the somethingness he spoke of while also the counterpart of our own negation.
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
We are reading the story of our lives / as though we were in it,’ Strand writes and much of his life filters in through his poems. And what a life as a decorated poet he lead. Born on the Price Edward Island in Canada to American parents, Strand came to Philadelphia at the age of four speaking little English and was ‘mocked and brutalized’ by his classmates for his thick French accent. Summers spent in Halifax brought him to the soul-bearing freedom of the wilderness which he ‘internalized.’ Much of this internalization is evident in his matured poetry, and the surreal introspection coupled with the eye for the beauty of the natural world makes one want to call his poetry the offspring of Charles Simic (with whom Strand was friends with beginning in the Sixties, with Simic having commented in his eulogy for Strand that Mark was fond of coming up with wild “get rich quick” schemes such as the time the two imported wine and sold them to students on campus) and Mary Oliver, though each poet is unique an inimitable in their own regard. I was particularly moved by his poems involving solitude and soul-searching while dwarfed by the wilderness, which dredged up precious sun-soaked memories of my own childhood summers spent wandering the dense woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a wonderment that I would suddenly stumble upon a fairy-tale epic adventure in the rich smelling overgrown foliage to match the stories that I had read or were currently writing in my head. These thoughts come alive through Strand’s poetry, such as this passage from Night at Hackett’s Cove :
Those nights I would gaze at the bay road,
at the cottages clustered under the moon’s immaculate stare,
nothing hinted that I would suffer so late
this turning away, this longing to be there.
Strand fully captures those moments of wishful thinking, late night longings and the blissful pains of loneliness that visit us all. There are moments that are outright tragic or of truth and faith being denied to you while they linger in the air just beyond grasp, and there are moments of utter beauty and empathy that make the reader cry out in joy for being felt—if only for a brief passing of lines—understood and not so alone in the world as once thought.
For Her
Let it be anywhere
on any night you wish,
in your room that is empty and dark
or down the street
or at those dim frontiers
you barely see, barely dream of.
You will not feel desire,
nothing will warn you,
no sudden wind, no stillness of air.
She will appear,
looking like someone you knew:
the friend who wasted her life,
the girl who sat under the palm tree.
Her bracelets will glitter,
becoming the lights
of a village you turned from years ago.
An aspect of Strand that I really enjoy is his fondness for surrealism and the way it comes through in his imagery. Strand has cited artists like Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Giorgio de Chirico amongst his influences and it really shows in the way he can make the abstract feel so tangible through his words. Strand is also fond of the comic poem, with many great playful works. One of his more famous, Eating Poetry , delivers a raucous joy for language and the art of being a poet, writing ‘Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. / There is no happiness like mine. / I have been eating poetry.’ How can one not have fun when the poet clearly is?
‘The sun setting. The lawns on fire
The lost day, the lost light.
Why do I love what fades?’
—from The Guardian
‘Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
/ When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end,’ Strand writes in The End and a preoccupation with death permeates many of his later collections. ‘I grow into my death,’ he states in My Life , adding that ‘My life is small / and getting smaller,’ in a way that harnesses his earlier examinations on identity and has progressed into an embrace of the self as something small yet still meaningful despite practically being meaningless in the grand scheme of eternity. But there is a lot of hope in this. ‘The story of the end, of the last word / Of the end, when told, is a story that never ends,’ he wrote in Poem After the Seven Last Words acknowledging that life goes on even after death, ‘the story / continues. So we continue. And the end, once more, / becomes the next, and the next after that.’ Strand may be gone, but through reading his words we keep him alive in our hearts and carry him with us. From this day to the next and the next after that.
Old Man Leaves the Party
It was clear when I left the party
That though I was over eighty I still had
A beautiful body. The moon shone down as it will
On moments of deep introspection. The wind held its breath.
And look, somebody left a mirror leaning against a tree.
Making sure that I was alone, I took off my shirt.
The flowers of bear grass nodded their moonwashed heads.
I took off my pants and the magpies circled the redwoods.
Down in the valley the creaking river was flowing once more.
How strange that I should stand in the wilds alone with my body.
I know what you are thinking. I was like you once. But now
With so much before me, so many emerald trees, and
Weed-whitened fields, mountains and lakes, how could I not
Be only myself, this dream of flesh, from moment to moment?
Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mark Strand was a fantastic artist and Collected Poems is an essential collection of American poetry. A big book full of big ideas and beautiful imagery, I have long loved this book and often dive back into Strand’s works when I need a pick me up. Luminous, intelligent, and empathetic, this is a marvelous collection and a perfect testament to the great poet.
5/5
The Remains
I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.
My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.
Read
June 18, 2022Sometimes I wonder about the merits of reading collected poems, especially when the body of work (in one volume) is huge, like, say, Mark Strand's Collected Poems, here weighing in at 510 pages.
After a while, you begin to pick up on themes and tropes, images and even words that the poet goes to like a touchstone. The poet might argue, "My poems are not meant to be read like this. They should not be swallowed in one massive gulp like Jonah and all that well-Red Sea water."
Well, maybe the poet would say such. I know I would. But I'm a lousy barometer.
For Strand, one favorite theme is death. Thus, his own recent death gave both obit and tribute writers plenty to work with. Strand thought a lot about his mortality, but there's just no way out of the box, which is why so many poems echo this theme, even make gentle fun of those who might dream differently. Strand also liked writing about the moon. Yes, the sky and stars and ocean, but especially the moon.
For those who like accessibility and the vernacular, Strand's your man. He buys little stock in high-falootin', though his ideas can play in that yard at times. Here's a typical Strand poem, one featuring not only the moon but early awareness of mortality, distant but sure.
My Name
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.
In typing "the scented air," I was reminded that Strand doesn't traffic in excess imagery. He shuns overuse of adjectives and adverbs, too. Lots of nouns and verbs. Lots of repetition and wordplay. And most definitely an ironic sense of humor.
I'll leave you with another musing on mortality called "In the Afterlife." It's quintessential Strand, I think (note: line breaks are off due sto the long line lengths and GR's wonky, anti-poem formatting):
She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot
remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a
house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain.
When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments
are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me
something, tell me anything.
After a while, you begin to pick up on themes and tropes, images and even words that the poet goes to like a touchstone. The poet might argue, "My poems are not meant to be read like this. They should not be swallowed in one massive gulp like Jonah and all that well-Red Sea water."
Well, maybe the poet would say such. I know I would. But I'm a lousy barometer.
For Strand, one favorite theme is death. Thus, his own recent death gave both obit and tribute writers plenty to work with. Strand thought a lot about his mortality, but there's just no way out of the box, which is why so many poems echo this theme, even make gentle fun of those who might dream differently. Strand also liked writing about the moon. Yes, the sky and stars and ocean, but especially the moon.
For those who like accessibility and the vernacular, Strand's your man. He buys little stock in high-falootin', though his ideas can play in that yard at times. Here's a typical Strand poem, one featuring not only the moon but early awareness of mortality, distant but sure.
My Name
Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.
In typing "the scented air," I was reminded that Strand doesn't traffic in excess imagery. He shuns overuse of adjectives and adverbs, too. Lots of nouns and verbs. Lots of repetition and wordplay. And most definitely an ironic sense of humor.
I'll leave you with another musing on mortality called "In the Afterlife." It's quintessential Strand, I think (note: line breaks are off due sto the long line lengths and GR's wonky, anti-poem formatting):
She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot
remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn't. There was a
house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain.
When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments
are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me
something, tell me anything.
Currently reading
January 1, 2016I received this as a gift, not this Christmas but the one before, along with several other books which I did not read last year. This Christmas I got no books! Karma? I better read them all before my birthday or I might get another round of "useful" gifts.
August 28, 2019
How long this will keep up,
I am not sure. My time
Is spent recalling all
I can of what has passed.
I try my best to believe
That nothing is wholly lost.
*
Days passed
and I would rest
my cheek against the glass,
wanting nothing but the old you.
*
Some things I wish I could forget.
*
On the beach the sadness of gramophones
deepens the ocean’s folding and falling.
It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.
*
the night passes
with its silent cargo
of moons and stars
*
I would like to be
In that solitude of soundless things, in the random
Company of the wind, to be weightless, nameless.
But not for long, for I would be downcast without
The things I keep inside my heart; and in no time
I would be back. Ah! the old heart
*
Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way.
*
Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past?
I am not sure. My time
Is spent recalling all
I can of what has passed.
I try my best to believe
That nothing is wholly lost.
*
Days passed
and I would rest
my cheek against the glass,
wanting nothing but the old you.
*
Some things I wish I could forget.
*
On the beach the sadness of gramophones
deepens the ocean’s folding and falling.
It is yesterday. It is still yesterday.
*
the night passes
with its silent cargo
of moons and stars
*
I would like to be
In that solitude of soundless things, in the random
Company of the wind, to be weightless, nameless.
But not for long, for I would be downcast without
The things I keep inside my heart; and in no time
I would be back. Ah! the old heart
*
Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way.
*
Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past?
December 11, 2014
While his narrative poems are not my favorite, re-reading the poetry in this collected volume made me incredibly happy, soothed, and full. I need to own it.
Some old and new favorites:
-No Man is Continent Who Visits Islands
-Eating Poetry
-Breath
-The Remains
-Coming to This
-My Son
-Black Sea
-Harmony in the Boudoir
Some old and new favorites:
-No Man is Continent Who Visits Islands
-Eating Poetry
-Breath
-The Remains
-Coming to This
-My Son
-Black Sea
-Harmony in the Boudoir
May 9, 2020
TAKING A WALK WITH YOU
“Lacking the wit and depth
That inform our dreams’
Bright landscapes,
This countryside
Through which we walk
Is no less beautiful
For being only what it seems.
Rising from the dyed
Pool of its shade,
The tree we lean against
Was never made to stand
For something else,
Let alone ourselves.
Nor were these fields
And gullies planned
With us in mind.
We live unsettled lives
And stay in a given place
Only long enough to find
We don’t belong.
Even the clouds, forming
Noiselessly overhead,
Are cloudy without
Resembling us and, storming
The vacant air,
Don’t take into account
Our present loneliness.
And yet, why should we care?
Already we are walking off
As if to say,
We are not here,
We’ve always been away.“
“Lacking the wit and depth
That inform our dreams’
Bright landscapes,
This countryside
Through which we walk
Is no less beautiful
For being only what it seems.
Rising from the dyed
Pool of its shade,
The tree we lean against
Was never made to stand
For something else,
Let alone ourselves.
Nor were these fields
And gullies planned
With us in mind.
We live unsettled lives
And stay in a given place
Only long enough to find
We don’t belong.
Even the clouds, forming
Noiselessly overhead,
Are cloudy without
Resembling us and, storming
The vacant air,
Don’t take into account
Our present loneliness.
And yet, why should we care?
Already we are walking off
As if to say,
We are not here,
We’ve always been away.“
February 23, 2015
This book is a treasure and I'm very glad to own it, though I'm sad to have finished it. The book was released in the weeks surrounding Mark Strand's death and so there is an air of tragedy and nobility infused (even more than usually) in his poems here.
As well as being a Pulitzer prize winner and critically acclaimed teacher, Strand is a tremendous personal influence. This book is a joy because you can watch the power of the surreal and the linguistic freedom which characterizes Strand's poetry grow with each collection. My personal favorites are the poems in Blizzard of One and the prose poems of Almost Invisible. This latter collection (which does contains some wide misses) shows Strand at the height of powers, perfecting his play with what we can say and what we can know, how we can say it and how we can know we said it. Unclear? Exactly. That's the way Strand likes it and that's the way he left it.
Don't be worried, however, that Strand's poetry is too cerebral and gauzy. This imprecision he's after, this liminality, is always brought to the reader through the world of the senses. It's just that these senses are scrambled and free to associate.
Thank you Mr. Strand and rest.
As well as being a Pulitzer prize winner and critically acclaimed teacher, Strand is a tremendous personal influence. This book is a joy because you can watch the power of the surreal and the linguistic freedom which characterizes Strand's poetry grow with each collection. My personal favorites are the poems in Blizzard of One and the prose poems of Almost Invisible. This latter collection (which does contains some wide misses) shows Strand at the height of powers, perfecting his play with what we can say and what we can know, how we can say it and how we can know we said it. Unclear? Exactly. That's the way Strand likes it and that's the way he left it.
Don't be worried, however, that Strand's poetry is too cerebral and gauzy. This imprecision he's after, this liminality, is always brought to the reader through the world of the senses. It's just that these senses are scrambled and free to associate.
Thank you Mr. Strand and rest.
October 21, 2014
From Shelf Awareness:
"To live in the world of Mark Strand's poetry is to inhabit a dream (or a nightmare, depending on your tolerance for the bizarre). In his Collected Poems, which spans the breadth and depth of his work as a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate, camels wander through suburban back yards and women undress mid-conversation. Strand morphs quotidian moments into revelations, a series of existential shrugs at life's absurdity and wonder.
Collected Poems traces Strand's career from infancy to establishment; while some other artists' collected works reveal a quantum leap from the first piece to the last, Strand's oeuvre remains remarkably high in caliber, with his earliest poems nearly as masterful as his most recent. Part of the pleasure of following his career is watching thematic interests shift and recur, reappearing throughout the years like coats buried at the back of a closet. Wind, moons, sleep, breath: all of these symbols cycle through volumes between 1962 and 2012, their meaning and menace varying with each use.
From his disturbing dreamscapes to his subtler quips on artistic ambition, the poet's voice is as inviting as it is uncanny. The intricate gives way to the bluntly truthful. In "The Good Life," from his 1970 collection Darker, Strand writes, "The good life gives no warning./ It weathers the climates of despair/ and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,/ and you are there." Where? Well, that's not entirely clear, but the reader is lucky to occupy this space alongside an iconic national voice."
"To live in the world of Mark Strand's poetry is to inhabit a dream (or a nightmare, depending on your tolerance for the bizarre). In his Collected Poems, which spans the breadth and depth of his work as a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate, camels wander through suburban back yards and women undress mid-conversation. Strand morphs quotidian moments into revelations, a series of existential shrugs at life's absurdity and wonder.
Collected Poems traces Strand's career from infancy to establishment; while some other artists' collected works reveal a quantum leap from the first piece to the last, Strand's oeuvre remains remarkably high in caliber, with his earliest poems nearly as masterful as his most recent. Part of the pleasure of following his career is watching thematic interests shift and recur, reappearing throughout the years like coats buried at the back of a closet. Wind, moons, sleep, breath: all of these symbols cycle through volumes between 1962 and 2012, their meaning and menace varying with each use.
From his disturbing dreamscapes to his subtler quips on artistic ambition, the poet's voice is as inviting as it is uncanny. The intricate gives way to the bluntly truthful. In "The Good Life," from his 1970 collection Darker, Strand writes, "The good life gives no warning./ It weathers the climates of despair/ and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,/ and you are there." Where? Well, that's not entirely clear, but the reader is lucky to occupy this space alongside an iconic national voice."
April 21, 2024
Poet Mark Strand (1934-2014) had a transparent sadness and awareness of mortality in his work that he used like a sword to pierce the reader with and also a way relating directly to them.
In his poems that address and include the moon, a dreadful shiver of mortality resounds, and one senses the presence of Giacomo Leopardi 1798-1837) hovering around and within the poesy.
He also did a fine job addressing memory's vagaries and had a buddhistic sense of "de ja vu". Though packing all his poems in one volume the way this was done, it is the evolution of a fine poet we had here.
The Coming of Light
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if
by themselves, stars gather, dreams
pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
In his poems that address and include the moon, a dreadful shiver of mortality resounds, and one senses the presence of Giacomo Leopardi 1798-1837) hovering around and within the poesy.
He also did a fine job addressing memory's vagaries and had a buddhistic sense of "de ja vu". Though packing all his poems in one volume the way this was done, it is the evolution of a fine poet we had here.
The Coming of Light
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if
by themselves, stars gather, dreams
pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
December 3, 2014
Have a peaceful transition to Eternity, Mark! Bon voyage!
Read
June 22, 2020I feel like I'm not qualified, really, to rate this, as most of it fell squarely in that "poetry I Do Not Get" category. The book followed seemingly his entire career, and though it was interesting to see how his style changed through the years, mostly I just kept hoping that I'd enjoy it more. Toward the mid-end of the book I started skimming, as it started to feel like the language was sipping into obscure vagueness for vagueness' sake, and in the end, only two poems in this huge book really grabbed me.
April 25, 2015
no shortage of bangers in this bad boy!
relevant link: http://www.theparisreview.org/fiction...
relevant link: http://www.theparisreview.org/fiction...
November 20, 2025
Mark Strand is my favourite poet. I have received a PhD Degree on his poetry in 1999. The topic of my PhD Thesis was "Otherness of Self: Fantasy and Black Humour in Mark Strand's Poetry". The Thesis is available on the Inflibnet Website.
Mark Strand (1934–2014), born in Canada but raised mostly in the United States, is one of the most distinctive and influential American poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His work is characterized by an eerie, minimalist elegance, a recurring preoccupation with absence, death, and the self’s dissolution, and a tone that hovers between wry humor and metaphysical dread.
Key elements of his poetic achievement:
Major awards and recognition
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1999) for Blizzard of One
MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship (1987)
United States Poet Laureate (1990–1991)
Bollingen Prize (1993)
Wallace Stevens Award (2004)
Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2009)
Signature style and themes
Strand’s mature poetry is spare, lucid, and often surreal in a quiet, almost domestic way. He perfected a kind of anti-lyric lyric: poems that seem to erase themselves as they go along, questioning the very possibility of presence, memory, or meaningful language.
Classic examples:
“Keeping Things Whole” (1969) – one of the most anthologized short American poems of the last half-century: “In a field / I am the absence / of field. … Wherever I am / I am what is missing.”
“The Dreadful Has Already Happened”
“The Poem of the End”
The entire book Dark Harbor (1993), a 55-part meditation on mortality that many consider his masterpiece.
Key books that mark his evolution
Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970) – established his early voice: cool, ironic, slightly menacing.
The Story of Our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978) – longer, more narrative sequences.
The Continuous Life (1990) and Blizzard of One (1998) – crystalline late style, often just a few words per line, yet emotionally devastating.
Man and Camel (2006) – surprising late turn toward playful, almost fable-like poems while still keeping the old darkness underneath.
Influence and teaching
Strand taught for decades (Columbia, Chicago, Utah, etc.) and shaped a generation of younger poets who value clarity, silence, and metaphysical wit (think Louise Glück, who was his student and frequent dedicatee, or poets like James Tate, Charles Simic, and Dean Young). His prose meditations (The Weather of Words, The Monument) are also widely admired.
Other notable contributions
Superb translator of Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
Important anthologist: co-edited The Best American Poetry 1991 and several influential books on contemporary poetry.
Wrote children’s books and short surreal fictions that read like prose poems (The Planet of Lost Things, 1982).
In the landscape of postwar American poetry, Strand occupies a unique niche: neither confessional nor Language-school, neither academic nor slam, he is the poet of luminous absence. His work feels like walking through an empty, perfectly lit museum at night—beautiful, slightly uncanny, and always aware that the viewer himself might vanish at any moment.
If Neruda is the poet of overflowing presence and historical fullness, Strand is the poet of exquisite subtraction. Both are indispensable, but they are almost perfect opposites.
Mark Strand (1934–2014), born in Canada but raised mostly in the United States, is one of the most distinctive and influential American poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. His work is characterized by an eerie, minimalist elegance, a recurring preoccupation with absence, death, and the self’s dissolution, and a tone that hovers between wry humor and metaphysical dread.
Key elements of his poetic achievement:
Major awards and recognition
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1999) for Blizzard of One
MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship (1987)
United States Poet Laureate (1990–1991)
Bollingen Prize (1993)
Wallace Stevens Award (2004)
Gold Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2009)
Signature style and themes
Strand’s mature poetry is spare, lucid, and often surreal in a quiet, almost domestic way. He perfected a kind of anti-lyric lyric: poems that seem to erase themselves as they go along, questioning the very possibility of presence, memory, or meaningful language.
Classic examples:
“Keeping Things Whole” (1969) – one of the most anthologized short American poems of the last half-century: “In a field / I am the absence / of field. … Wherever I am / I am what is missing.”
“The Dreadful Has Already Happened”
“The Poem of the End”
The entire book Dark Harbor (1993), a 55-part meditation on mortality that many consider his masterpiece.
Key books that mark his evolution
Reasons for Moving (1968) and Darker (1970) – established his early voice: cool, ironic, slightly menacing.
The Story of Our Lives (1973) and The Late Hour (1978) – longer, more narrative sequences.
The Continuous Life (1990) and Blizzard of One (1998) – crystalline late style, often just a few words per line, yet emotionally devastating.
Man and Camel (2006) – surprising late turn toward playful, almost fable-like poems while still keeping the old darkness underneath.
Influence and teaching
Strand taught for decades (Columbia, Chicago, Utah, etc.) and shaped a generation of younger poets who value clarity, silence, and metaphysical wit (think Louise Glück, who was his student and frequent dedicatee, or poets like James Tate, Charles Simic, and Dean Young). His prose meditations (The Weather of Words, The Monument) are also widely admired.
Other notable contributions
Superb translator of Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
Important anthologist: co-edited The Best American Poetry 1991 and several influential books on contemporary poetry.
Wrote children’s books and short surreal fictions that read like prose poems (The Planet of Lost Things, 1982).
In the landscape of postwar American poetry, Strand occupies a unique niche: neither confessional nor Language-school, neither academic nor slam, he is the poet of luminous absence. His work feels like walking through an empty, perfectly lit museum at night—beautiful, slightly uncanny, and always aware that the viewer himself might vanish at any moment.
If Neruda is the poet of overflowing presence and historical fullness, Strand is the poet of exquisite subtraction. Both are indispensable, but they are almost perfect opposites.
September 10, 2023
Didžiausias mano favoritas iš 20 a. antrosios pusės amerikiečių poetų. Džiaugiuosi, kad galiaus turiu jo "Collected Poems" (dėkui Žilvinui K.); lig šiol teturėjau rinkinius. Melancholija su siurrealizmo pamušalu. Bet - su guodžiančiais šviesos blyksneliais: "Even as you lean over this page, / late and alone, it shines; even now / in the moment before it disappears". Apsieina be socialinių reikalėlių, tačiau: tapatybė ("My Life by Somebody Else"), nyksmas, metamorfozės... Puiki šešių dalių "Elegy for My Father": "You went on with your dying. / Nothing could stop you. / Not the past. / Not the future with its good weather. / Not the view from your window, the view of the graveyard. / Not the city. Not the terrible city with its wooden buildings. / Not defeat. Not success. / You did nothing but go on with your dying". Esu šią elegiją išvertęs. Nuostabi poema "Dark Harbor". Palyginus labai nedaug vidutiniškų kūrinių. Du gražūs eilėraščiai apie konkrečius De Chirico paveikslus...
July 19, 2022
U.S. Poet Laureate and many other accolades. Not my style, quite masculine and east coast, although I like his sense of humor and his focus on seasons....with a certain sense of marching toward death as he gets older...it's forgivable. The last poem in the book,
WHEN I TURNED A HUNDRED
I wanted to go on an immense journey, to travel night and day into the unknown, until, forgetting my old self, I came into possession of a new self, one that I might have missed on my previous travels. But the first step was beyond me. I lay in bed, unable to move, pondering, as one does at my yage, the ways of melancholy--how it seeps into the spirit, how it disincarnates the will, how it banishes the senses to the chill of twilight, how even the best and worst intentions wither in its keep. I kept staring at the ceiling, then suddenly felt a blat of cold air, and I was gone.
WHEN I TURNED A HUNDRED
I wanted to go on an immense journey, to travel night and day into the unknown, until, forgetting my old self, I came into possession of a new self, one that I might have missed on my previous travels. But the first step was beyond me. I lay in bed, unable to move, pondering, as one does at my yage, the ways of melancholy--how it seeps into the spirit, how it disincarnates the will, how it banishes the senses to the chill of twilight, how even the best and worst intentions wither in its keep. I kept staring at the ceiling, then suddenly felt a blat of cold air, and I was gone.
July 21, 2018
I wanted to read Mark Strand ever since I read his poem “Eating Poetry.” Even after reading this whole book of poems, That is still my favorite poem.
I enjoyed this book and I enjoyed reading all the different poems that he wrote over the years. I think I like his earlier times better. I feel like I identified with them more. They have more of a magical and lyrical quality. I feel like it’s a later point tend to veer off into a more pros bent.
I wanted to get through the book to get an overall impression. I will definitely go back and reread my favorite and read them in the slow way they deserve.
I enjoyed this book and I enjoyed reading all the different poems that he wrote over the years. I think I like his earlier times better. I feel like I identified with them more. They have more of a magical and lyrical quality. I feel like it’s a later point tend to veer off into a more pros bent.
I wanted to get through the book to get an overall impression. I will definitely go back and reread my favorite and read them in the slow way they deserve.
March 19, 2019
I only became interested in Mark Strand's work beginning in the late 80s, when he seemed to be expanding his metier from the deep image/surrealism-cum-water of his earlier, influential work, which in the hands of many others, ossified into "a thing" in the 1970s. I think "The History of Poetry" steered me to greater interest, this elevated, but also allusive, somewhat oracular mode that encompassed the social and physical landscape.
July 14, 2023
I suppose a collection this large isn’t meant to be read in one sitting but alas I had a four hour layover. Strand’s work lays on the border between intellectually complicated and easily digestible, which makes his works an excellent transition for those looking to study more complex poetry. Not my favorite ever, though.
April 25, 2018
Undoubtedly a fine poet who seems to be caught up on cold winters and death in much of his work. Enjoyed his earlier work more than the more recent pieces. I especially recommend The Everyday Enchantment of Music, a more recent work. As Poet Laureate for 1999 one can hardly complain!
April 15, 2022
So many exquisite poems here from an intricate mind. The long poem Dark Harbour - in tercets - follows on greatly from Wallace Stevens but then ends - if I am correct in this - with a beautiful reentry of the convocation of the poets in Dante's limbo
January 17, 2024
Read this book a thousand times over and annotated it. One of the best poetry books I’ve read to date. Only gave it four stars because I loaned it to a girl I once liked and never got it back, unfortunately.
Read
April 21, 2023All of his collected poems
November 27, 2023
“And the weeping went round and round and could not stop.”
June 16, 2024
翻着基本上读完，最喜欢的是开头结尾生命两端的几首诗，比较自然的风趣。中间大部分诗太知识分子趣味、太自我调侃了，可能是因为一气读了很多，反倒有点索然无味。
January 8, 2026
I love his poem "In Memory of Joseph Brodsky."
The others don't strike as deep a chord with me.
The others don't strike as deep a chord with me.
September 25, 2025
A bunch of these poems felt closed off to me, pretty solipsistic I guess? Then on the other hand there are so many that surprised me, made me read them over and over and look forward to return to, that I cannot give this any less than 5 stars.
Read
January 31, 2026A great collection of poetry. Atmospheric, evocative, intriguing, and a consistent quality across the entire oeuvre.
August 17, 2016
It's always interesting to have a collection that spans a poet's lifetime of work. While I didn't connect with most of it (for me, the clever, witty language seemed a screen that often blocked that connection instead of being a conduit), Strand was clearly an important poet, worthy of our attempted attention.
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