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Blizzard of One : Poems by Mark Strand
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Reviews of Blizzard of One : Poems by Mark Strand
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Mark Strand's Blizzard of One features a collage of his own devising on
the cover: an expanse of red and blue geometric planes, broken up by the
appearance of an ice floe on the imaginary horizon. The image invites the
viewer to fill up the surrounding emptiness. So too does the white space
surrounding Strand's taut, spare, metaphysical verse. The quest for the
single lyric's integrity and wholeness sets Strand apart from those poets
for whom the provisional is everything. And this is an artist who never
shies away from the absolute: indeed, he manages to make each poem in
the book recapitulate the beginning and the end.
There is a terrible atmosphere of finality and doom to these poems. In
two splendid villanelles, for example, Strand pays homage to De Chirico,
and the tension of lines like these brings with it a strange shiver of
pleasure:
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
One tries to brush it off. It only grows.
Something about the silence of the square.
Something is wrong; something about the air,
Its color; about the light, the way it glows.
Boredom sets in first, and then despair.
Strand continues to acknowledge his debt to Wallace Stevens, while
taking the impulse to a further level of abstraction: "Even now we seem
to
be waiting / For something whose appearance would be its vanishing."
Yet he can also deal lightly and self-mockingly with serious concerns:
"Now that the great dog I worshipped for years / Has become none
other than myself, I can look within / And bark, and I can look at the
mountains down the street / And bark at them as well...." No poet has
been able to make more out of a minimalist aesthetic than Mark Strand.
He strives for elegance and masterful brevity, and whether he's working
his ominous or light-fingered register, his formalism is never precious,
always an agent of necessity. --Mark Rudman
The New York Times Book Review, Deborah Garrison
There are a handful of contemporary poets whom we can consider only
by gazing upward.... Mark Strand is undeniably one of these luminaries.
Buy Blizzard of One : Poems by Mark Strand at amazon by clicking here
The New York Review of Books, John Bayley
...Mark Strand's poems, like John Ashbery's, can be read with great and
almost dreamy pleasure....
From Booklist , May 15, 1998
Strand almost gives himself over to the sway of emotion, but remains
reserved instead, polite, stoic, and elusive. This tension between abandon
and control is expressed in the stylistic duality of his poems, which seem
offhanded and proselike but which turn out to be breathtakingly lyric.
He
tells us that nothing we're apt to strive for really matters, that everything
just comes and goes, like wind, like breath, like love. What makes our
spinning existences beautiful and precious are moments of repose,
reflection, and wonder, like the scene in "A Piece of the Storm," the
source of the collection's title, in which a single snowflake makes its
way
into one room and the awareness of one person. Another title could serve
as Strand's credo, "Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life," a concept he
further explores in "A Suite of Appearances" by observing that "we clear
a space for ourselves." This space, this refuge, is where poignancy and
poetry live, and where Strand waxes and wanes like his totemic celestial
body, the moon.
Copyright© 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews , June 1, 1998
Former Poet Laureate, and a writer in a number of genres, this Univ. of
Chicago professor and much-honored poet has developed over the years
an aesthetic much his own: The discursive, easy surfaces of his quiet,
gently surreal poems accumulate into a complex metaphysic, a notion of
time and space that permeates his every utterance, whether abstract or
concrete. And his poems teem with simple actions and things: a dog
barks, a snowflake melts, a ship sails. Strand cant escape the momentary
nature of experience: In the revelatory Suite of Appearances, he captures
the fluidity of the self and reminds us that the history of ourselves leaves
us cold, the past means nothing to our ever-present nowness. Risking
tautology, Strand suggests that the self is both a disguise and not one,
that
all things are wronged/By representation, an idea that helps explain his
precise diction, however wronged the object he hopes to describe. Poem
after poem exults in the pleasures of daily life and the clarity of immediate
experience, which makes his elegy to Joseph Brodsky an awkward
remembrance, a measure of meanwhile. At his best, Strand pursues the
elusive pronoun it through poems that duplicate randomness and repeat
themselves often. At his self- congratulatory worst, in the dizzingly long
Delirium Waltz, he includes himself in the dance of great poets, whom he
refers to coyly by first names, from Eliot and Dickinson, to Donald
Justice and Red Warren, to Jorie Graham and Charles Wright. The
canonization of himself and his contemporaries seems premature,
however indicative it is of Strands artistic confidence.. -- Copyright
©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description of Blizzard of One : Poems by Mark Strand
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.
Blizzard of One is an extraordinary book--the summation of the work of
a lifetime by one of our very few true masters of the art of poetry.
Synopsis of Blizzard of One : Poems by Mark Strand
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand writes poems that weave
between abstraction and the detailed particulars of actual experience.
His
poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking", but they are also
unexpectedly funny. Strand makes reading poetry a joy, even for those
who prefer prose.
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.
Buy Blizzard of One : Poems by Mark Strand at amazon by clicking here
About the Author of Blizzard of One, by Mark Strand
Mark Strand is a former Poet Laureate of the United States. He has
written eight earlier books of poems, which have brought him many
honors and grants, including a MacArthur Fellowship. He is the author of
a book of stories, Mr. and Mrs. Baby, several volumes and translations
(of works by Rafeal Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among
others), the editor of a number of anthologies, and author of several
monographs on contemporary artists (William Bailey and Edward
Hopper). He was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada,
and was raised and educated in the United States and South America.
He teaches currently in the Committee on Social Thought at the
University of Chicago.
Table of Poems from Poem Finder®
As For The Poem The Adorable One Slipped Into Your Pocket
The Beach Hotel
The Delirium Waltz
Five Dogs: 1
Five Dogs: 2
Five Dogs: 3
Five Dogs: 4
Five Dogs: 5
The Great Poet Returns
Here
I Will Love The Twenty-first Century
In Memory Of Joseph Brodsky
Morning, Noon And Night: 1
Morning, Noon And Night: 2
Morning, Noon And Night: 3
The Next Time: 1
The Next Time: 2
The Next Time: 3
The Night, The Porch
Old Man Leaves Party
Our Masterpiece Is The Private Life: 1
Our Masterpiece Is The Private Life: 2
Our Masterpiece Is The Private Life: 3
A Piece Of The Storm
Precious Little
Some Last Words
A Suite Of Appearances: 1
A Suite Of Appearances: 2
A Suite Of Appearances: 3
A Suite Of Appearances: 4
A Suite Of Appearances: 5
A Suite Of Appearances: 6
Two De Chiricos: 1. The Philosopher's Conquest
Two De Chiricos: 2. The Disquieting Muses
The View
What It Was: 1
What It Was: 2
Copyright© 1998 Roth Publishing, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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