To live in the world of Mark Strand's poetry is to inhabit a dream (or a nightmare, depending on your tolerance for the bizarre). In his Collected Poems, which spans the breadth and depth of his work as a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate, camels wander through suburban back yards and women undress mid-conversation. Strand morphs quotidian moments into revelations, a series of existential shrugs at life's absurdity and wonder.
Collected Poems traces Strand's career from infancy to establishment; while some other artists' collected works reveal a quantum leap from the first piece to the last, Strand's oeuvre remains remarkably high in caliber, with his earliest poems nearly as masterful as his most recent. Part of the pleasure of following his career is watching thematic interests shift and recur, reappearing throughout the years like coats buried at the back of a closet. Wind, moons, sleep, breath: all of these symbols cycle through volumes between 1962 and 2012, their meaning and menace varying with each use.
From his disturbing dreamscapes to his subtler quips on artistic ambition, the poet's voice is as inviting as it is uncanny. The intricate gives way to the bluntly truthful. In "The Good Life," from his 1970 collection Darker, Strand writes, "The good life gives no warning./ It weathers the climates of despair/ and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,/ and you are there." Where? Well, that's not entirely clear, but the reader is lucky to occupy this space alongside an iconic national voice. --Linnie Greene, freelance writer and bookseller at Flyleaf Books