Selected Poems (Mark Strand)

Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 1979

Have I really been gone so long?? It didn't feel long to me at all. I apologize, dear readers. I won't say it won't happen again, but I'm in the middle of at least three books right now, so I'm bound to finish at least one soon.

In a wonderful YA book called Baby, the main character's grandmother explains to her granddaughter why she bothers to read poetry (in this case, William Carlos Williams) to a small child: "She doesn't need to understand, dear. She likes the way the words sound."

That is, in a nutshell, how I feel about Strand's poetry. Very little of what he says makes any sense to me. His poetry is almost never narrative, and though it's often in the first or second person, he relies mainly on images of inanimate objects to carry his poetry.

And in that particular arena, he succeeds. His poetry is among the most atmospheric (often creepily so) that I've ever read. Consider:

The Sleep

There is the sleep of my tongue
speaking a language I can never remember --
words that enter the sleep of words
once they are spoken.

There is the sleep of one moment
inside the next, lengthening the night,
and the sleep of the window
turning the tall sleep of trees into glass.

The sleep of novels as they are read is soundless
like the sleep of dresses on the warm bodies of women.
And the sleep of thunder gathering dust on sunny days
and the sleep of ashes long after.

The sleep of wind has been known to fill the sky.
The long sleep of air locked in the lungs of the dead.
The sleep of a room with someone inside it.
Ever the wooden sleep of the moon is possible.

And there is the sleep that demands I lie down
and be fitted to the dark that comes upon me
like another skin in which I shall never be found,
out of which I shall never appear.

How I feel about "The Sleep" is actually an excellent example of exactly how I feel about all of Strand's poetry: I appreciate it for its technical brilliance; I am mildly haunted by it for a moment; but in the long run, I'm not moved. In a very, very long book (long for poetry, i.e. over 150 pages), there were very few lines that jumped out at me for tucking away in my subconscious.

Strand's style, to be perfectly honest, can also get a bit tiresome. Lots of short declarative sentences with simplistic constructions, long stanzas, the same images used over and over (the moon, bones, night, shadows, and whiteness, to randomly name five).

If you want to read any of Strand, I'd suggest an earlier standalone work, not an anthology. (I liked the poems at the beginning of this book better than those toward the middle and end.) It may be more of a book to study than to enjoy.

Recommended? Totally a matter of taste.