Mark Strand (Ernest Hilbert)

Throughout his distinguished career, Mark Strand has successfully voiced with clarity that which is seemingly beyond the purview of everyday language. His poetry is situated on a volatile faultline between what we accept as reality and what is just beyond our grasp. As a result, his poetry is remarkably serene with the promise, always the promise, of impending fury and disintegration. The cover of his latest collection, Blizzard of One, which won the Pulitzer Prize, features a collage by Strand himself. Two amorphous pale forms are settled on a horizon and resemble icebergs on an eerily still sea beneath a red sky. It is as if a storm is approaching. For the moment, however, the sea remains motionless, waiting. It is impossible to determine if the worlds depicted in the Blizzard of One are fixed-landscapes frozen and held for the searching eye and questioning mind--or are merely calm, lulling us into a vulnerable tranquillity. The tides that move slowly beneath the taut rhythms of the poetry set the world into motion, allow us to experience what rushes out from each moment while reflecting on the causes and purposes that led us to it. This is what Strand describes as "the weather of leavetaking." The finely-wrought metaphysical poetry of his earlier books is continued here, where to "stare at nothing is to learn by heart / What all of us will be swept into." Indebted as much to André Breton as to Wallace Stevens, Strand encloses the fluid course of time and action in a discursive framework that disturbingly provides as many questions as answers.

Blizzard of One is divided into four sections that achieve together a strangely comforting music, recapitulating and transforming themes that recur throughout his poetry, the opposing poles of fixity and flux, creation and loss, action and remembrance, but this music is more a succession of sad songs than movements of a string quartet. Throughout Blizzard of One, a spectral narrator leads us through disquieting landscapes and rooms much as, in a more literal way, Virgil's shade conducts Dante through hell and purgatory in the Divina Comedia or as the apparition of Dante in turn leads T.S. Eliot through bombed-out London in the Four Quartets. As in Strand's earlier books, most notably Dark Harbor, there is an atmosphere of changing light and weather that reflect changing perceptions and emotion. Figures seem to exist in a perpetual twilight, waiting for the fullness of night.

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