MARK STRAND

POET

“Strand's poems resonate with a shimmering sense of the infinite . . . . His apparently simple line have the eerie, seductive ring of the inevitable.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Mark Strand has chosen the negative path, with loss as the first step towards fullness: it is also the opening to a transparent verbal perfection.”
—Octavio Paz

Mark Strand, former United States Poet Laureate, was born on Canada's Prince Edward Island in 1934, and was raised and educated in the United States and South America. He is the author of ten books of poems, including Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Dark Harbor (1993); The Continuous Life (1990); Selected Poems (1980); The Story of Our Lives (1973); and Reasons for Moving (1968). He has also published two books of prose, several volumes of translation (of works by Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), several monographs on contemporary artists, and three books for children. He has edited a number of volumes, including The Golden Ecco Anthology (1994), The Best American Poetry 1991, and Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers (with Charles Simic, 1976). His honors include the Bollingen Prize, three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Edgar Allen Poe Prize, and a Rockefeller Foundation award, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He is a former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He currently teaches at Columbia University.

Strand's poetry is known for a clarity reminiscent of the paintings of Edward Hopper, and for a deeply inward sense of language. Many of the poems aspire to the condition of dreams, shot through with images possessing a strangely haunting vividness, as in 'The Ghost Ship,' which summons a mysterious ship that floats 'Through the crowded streets ... / its vague / tonnage like wind.'

REVIEW OF MAN AND CAMEL (KNOPF, 2006)
Strand is a riddler, at once vatic and comedic. A fabulist and a surrealist in the manner of Borges and Calvino, he writes spare, melancholy, and haunting poems. A painter before he became a poet, he translates into words the solitary spell of Edward Hopper and the mystery of Giorgio de Chirico. In his first major collection since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blizzard of One (1998), Strand imagines an aging Death in a limo "with a blanket spread across his thighs"; and a man who sets out to pick up a cake but fails to do so, perhaps because he's "lost in thought" for years on end. Vigils are undertaken, and what arrives can be shattering, such as the man and camel in the title poem. People are displaced by unseen catastrophes, and the sea and the moon by turns reveal and conceal. 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. Two works originally composed to accompany string quartets are nothing less than sublime, "The Webern Variations" and "Poem after the Seven Last Words." Donna Seaman, Booklist