Blizzard of One

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ISBN 10: 1904130151 / ISBN 13: 9781904130154

Published by -, 2005

About this Item

Blizzard of One This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping.

Seller Inventory # 7719-9781904130154

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Blizzard of One
• Publisher: -
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1904130151
• ISBN 13: 9781904130154
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Waywiser's edition of Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Blizzard of One' has been enlarged to contain 11 new poems: "Man and Camel", "Mother and Son", "Cake", "Marsyas", "Mirror", "Black Sea", "2002", "2032", "Elevator", "The Webern Variations" and "Poem After the Seven Last Words".

Review

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