Blizzard of One

by Mark Strand

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780375701375
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/08/2000
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	72
Sales rank:	195,654
Product dimensions:	5.72(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.21(d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

"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."

Table of Contents

I
	Untitled	3
	The Beach Hotel	4
	Old Man Leaves Party	5
	I Will Love the Twenty-First Century	6
	The Next Time	7
	The Night, the Porch	10
	Precious Little	11
	The Great Poet Returns	12
II
	Our Masterpiece is the Private Life	15
	Morning, Noon, and Night	18
	A Piece of the Storm	20
	A Suite of Appearances	21
	Here	27
	Two De Chiricos	28
	Some Last Words	30
III
	Five Dogs	35
IV
	In Memory of Joseph Brodsky	43
	What it was	44
	The Delirium Waltz	46
	The View	55

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

A poet of commanding intellect and haunting imagery, he catches glimmers that hover at the furthest reaches of consciousness.

New Yorker

...[L]ines both dreamily elegant and touchingly weird.

Entertainment Weekly

This poet knows how to make language sharp, how to make it sing as he burns his vision into readers' minds.
— The Christian Science Monitor

Elizabeth Lund

There are a handful of contemporary poets whom we can consider only by gazing upward. . . .Mark Strand is undeniably one of these luminaries. . . .Strand's ability to capture. . .'spectral glimpses' is . . .finally what earns him his place in the pantheon.
— The New York Times Book Review

Deborah Garrison

This poet knows how to make language sharp, how to make it sing as he burns his vision into readers' minds.
— The Christian Science Monitor

Elizabeth Lund

Former Poet Laureate, and a writer in a number of genres, this University 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 can't 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 Strand's artistic confidence.

Kirkus Reviews