Blizzard of One: Poems - Hardcover

Strand, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375401393 ISBN 13: 9780375401398

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

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. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

Since Yeats linked the "labor to be beautiful" with the work of poetry, no poet has taken the link more to heartAor made handsomer, more stylish poems out of mirror-gazingAthan former Poet Laureate Strand (Dark Harbor, etc.). Whether in the charming monologues of "Five Dogs," the moving elegy "In Memory of Joseph Brodsky" or the dream-memoir of his social circle, "The Delirium Waltz," Strand insists on the failure of poetry to preserve our reflections or to reanimate the ghosts of memory and loss. "Time slips by," he writes in "The Next Time," "our sorrows do not turn into poems,/ And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,/ Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,/ And so many people we love have gone." The frank, elegiac brio and easy swing of lines like these have always distinguished Strand's work, and they have never sounded more seductive. Crowded with tributes to friends like Jorie Graham, Octavio Paz and the painter William Bailey, this wonderful, varied new collection also shows a wit reminiscent of John AshberyAprivate, hard to pin down, addicted to deferrals and dying falls. If there is something scandalous in Strand's gorgeous, unabashed nostalgia or erotic melancholy, the scandal is how inescapable these modes remainAfor us and for one of our most deeply enjoyable poets.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

Together with Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, and other then-young poets of the 1960s, Strand created a spectral nightscape for American poetry to inhabit. Combining a loner's sensibilities with a romanticized but icy realm of moonlight, shadows, and a haunting, ever-present wind, Strand paced the uncertain borders between beauty and oblivion, longing and fulfillment, identity and assimilation. His personae embraced empty air, disappeared, became someone else ("What we desire... is the comfort/ Of being strangers at least to ourselves"). Nearly 40 years later very little has changed. Same wind, same stars, same low-key reverie occasionally broken by a wry self-chiding ("The moon shone down as it will/ On moments of deep introspection") or epiphanic statement of the obvious ("Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems"). Certainly this genre of poetry boasts no more accomplished or suave a practitioner than Strand, but the novelty of its seductive surfaces dimmed long ago, and only Strand's newest or most devoted readers will find much to intrigue them here.AFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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. Donna Seaman

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"A Piece of the Storm"

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375401393
• ISBN 13: 9780375401398
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72