Former U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand, "whose spare, deceptively simple investigations of rootlessness, alienation and the ineffable strangeness of life made him one of America's most hauntingly meditative poets," died Saturday, the New York Times reported. He was 80. Strand was named poet laureate in 1990 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for Blizzard of One.
Noting that "absence, negation and death were abiding themes for Mr. Strand," the Times observed that "in a sense, he wrote his epitaph many times over, most poignantly perhaps in 'The Remains,' from his 1970 collection Darker":
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.
What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.
My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds.
How can I sing? Time tells me what I am.
I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.
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Novelist Kent Haruf, who wrote "several quiet, moving novels that take place in the fictional town of Holt, Colo.," died Sunday, the Washington Post reported. He was 71. Haruf's novel Plainsong (1999) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and his most recent book, Benediction (2013), was on the shortlist for this year's Folio Prize.
Gary Fisketjon, his editor at Knopf, said Haruf's last novel, Our Souls at Night, will be published next year. "Kent had finished all his revisions and even gone through the copy editing. We had it scheduled for May, though I haven't yet processed how this tragic news might alter those plans."
Knopf issued a statement saying the publisher was "deeply saddened to report the death of Kent Haruf.... It has been our great privilege to publish his extraordinary fiction."