Mark Strand

I have some general and specific thoughts about the selection of Mark Strand's poetry, so I'll just pour a few of them out for this first entry. One of the things I really love about his work is that it is grounded in the senses but still manages to philosophize about language-- I'll only touch on the sensual aspect of his poetry in this first short entry.

A couple of things I loved: In the first poem, "Keeping Things Whole", the second stanza about the displacement of air caused by walking strikes a resonant chord within me. Last week I was walking with a friend and we did a little meditation focusing on the feeling of the air between our fingers. The sensation was intimately intense, and it felt like sharing a secret touch with the wind. So at the moment, "Keeping Things Whole" really speaks to me.

Strand has this brilliant way of turning phrase that keeps me on my toes more than many of the poets that I've been reading recently in preparation for the GRE subject test. I appreciate the way he takes classical subject matter (like a relationship gone sour) and shapes it into something innovative and new as in "Coming to This" when he refers to "the heavy industry/ of each other" and the meat sitting "in the white lake of its dish". I love that in this poem, a landscape is suggested by the depiction of a dysfunctional relationship (I imagine a landscape of coal plants, which I suppose is fitting for me to imagine, given I just read an article about the direction that Europe's energy infrastructure seems to be headed in), that the meat sitting sadly in its dish ends up being a reflection of its own bleak, dead landscape.

OK, that's all for tonight. I need some sleep, but I wanted to get going on this.