Synopses & Reviews
More than twenty-five years after the appearance of his first
Selected Poems, we at last have a magnificent new gathering of Mark Strands work, one that spans and celebrates his entire remarkable career to date. From
Sleeping with One Eye Open (1964) through the wonderful middle work that includes
The Continuous Life (1990), and crowned by the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Blizzard of One (1998) and his most recent collection,
Man and Camel (2006), this book makes a crucial selection of Strands always beautiful and by turns humorous and melancholy poems.
Over the decades Strands identity as a poet has remained firm: he is existential, playful, mysterious, a poet of simple words and sentences that somehow add up to powerful universal experiences. With his incantatory language and radiant, commanding imagery, he creates mythic scenes and vistas that, however otherworldly, are ultimately of this earth: their underlying subject the pain and pleasure of being mortal.
Here is an essential compilation from one of the most beloved and honored American poets at work today, without which no modern poetry collection is complete.
About the Author
Mark Strand is the author of eleven books of poems, as well as a collection of short stories and several volumes of translations, anthologies, and monographs. He has received many honors and awards for his poems, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize (for Blizzard of One), and the Bollingen Prize. In 1990 he was chosen Poet Laureate of the United States. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.