Man and Camel

This eleventh collection by Mark Strand is a toast to life's transience and abiding beauty. He begins with a group of light but haunting fables, populated by figures like the King, a tiny creature in ermine who has lost his desire to rule, and by the poet's own alter ego, who recounts the fetching mystery of the title poem: "I sat on the porch having a smoke / when out of the blue a man and a camel / happened by." The poet has Arctic adventures and encounters with the bearded figure of Death; in his controlled tone, he creates his bold visions and shows us, like a magician, how they vanish in a blink. Gradually, his fancies give way to powerful scenes of loss, as in "The Mirror," where the face of a beautiful woman stares past him

into a place I could only imagine...
as if just then I were stepping
from the depths of the mirror
into that white room, breathless and eager,
only to discover too late
that she is not there.

Man and Camel concludes with a small masterpiece of meditations crafted around the Seven Last Words of Christ. Here, this secular poet finds resonance in the bedrock of Christ's language, the actual words that have governed so many generations of thought and belief. As always with Mark Strand, the discovery of meaning in the sound of language itself is an act of faith that enlightens us and carries us beyond the bounds of the rational.

Signature Review by Richard Howard
"As fastidious as he is famous (both qualifications remarkable for an American poet of this day and age), Strand allows this new book to show all the signs of pruning and purging. The sieve of art descends into the well of intimate contemplation and retrieves 23 closely reasoned poems remarkably consistent in the character of the Baffled Seer persisting in the double terror (or is it joy?) of all Strand's expression: evanescence of the longed-for Other, desolate wonder of the self. It is no surprise, rather a sort of consolation, that except for the two poems commissioned to be read between movements of three Webern quartets and a Heyden quartet, most of these poems scrupulously record the actions and adventures of that wonderful 'I,' the character whose accents it has been Strand's genius to create in book after book: 'I went to the middle of the room and called out,' 'I closed my eyes briefly,' 'I filled page after page,' 'I am not thinking of death,' '...there would be a fire and I would walk into it,' 'I said that the dawning of the unknown was always before us,' 'I ran downstairs and called for my horse,' 'I'm going down,' said I. And in the archetypal title poem: 'I sat on the porch having a smoke' when the Other (here the Muse, the Mirage and what Strand calls 'the ideal image for all uncommon couples') appears to the expectant smoker, '...just as they were vanishing/ the man and camel ceased to sing.' The vision fades, the bereft self cannot be accommodated.The two chamber music commissions are curiously Miltonic (impersonally sumptuous) in their chastened baroque tonalities, but however grandly invested in the mysteries of music ('the secret voice of being telling us/ that where we disappear is where we are') and of spiritual dedication ('to know/ at last that nothing is more real than nothing'), Strand more characteristically winnows a familiar comfort from 'My Name,' one of the loveliest and humblest poems he has yet written, from whose 12 lines I cite only the final few as a sort of hostage to greatness:...and I heardmy name as if for the first time, heard it the wayone hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far offas though it belonged not to me but to the silencefrom which it had come and to which it would go." Richard Howard is a poet, critic and translator. He teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Publishers Weekly (Copyright © Reed Business Information)

"By virtue of Strand's restraint, archetypal images, and pitch-perfect sense of the music of language, the most common words turn lustrous in poems of startling imagery and extraordinarily deep emotion." Booklist

"...Strand's spare, sure-footed technique can still beguile...and, however briefly, can remove us from the jittery, cacophonous world we accept as the real one. Recommended..." Library Journal

"The recurring themes...seemed somewhat annoying in a brisk first-read....But repeated readings yielded a respect for these weirdly plain-spoken (though not plain-thought) poems." Oregonian

"The language is incantatory, the images dreamlike and the poems themselves often deceptively simple....With his curiosity and humor, he's a wonderfully congenial companion, a fearless guide..." Los Angeles Times

A luminous new collection from this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet — his first since 1998 — is a toast to life's transience, strangeness, and abiding beauty.

Mark Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was raised and educated in the United States. He is the author of ten earlier books of poems. He is also the author of a book of stories, Mr. and Mrs. Baby, three volumes of translations (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, and of anonymous Quechua lyrics), a number of anthologies (most recently 100 Great Poems of the Twentieth Century), and monographs on the contemporary artists William Bailey and Edward Hopper. He has received many honors and grants for his poems, including a MacArthur Fellowship for 1987–92, and in 1990 he was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States. In 1993 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize, and in 1999 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Blizzard of One. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.