Volume 47, Number 13 · August 10, 2000
On the Night Train
By Charles Simic
The Weather of Words: Poetic Invention
by Mark Strand
Knopf, 142 pp., $22.00
Blizzard of One
by Mark Strand
Knopf, 55 pp., $15.00 (paper)
Chicken, Shadow, Moon & more
by Mark Strand
Turtle Point, 91 pp., $21.95
It's a great stroke of luck, when it comes to poetry, that human beings do not know themselves very well. We meet the familiar stranger in our mirror, pretending most days that there's nothing odd about him, nothing worth thinking about, but in fact we know better. 'Why am I me? Why not a goldfish in a fish tank in a restaurant somewhere on the outskirts of Des Moines?' Mark Strand asks in The Weather of Words, his fine new collection of essays and comic pieces. Poets, like everyone else, do not have the answer. However, here's where the fun starts. In poetry, life's ambiguities are worth more than what can be explained. They cause poems to be written. The true poet, one might say, gropes in the dark. Far from being omniscient on the subject of his work, he is merely a faithful servant of his hunches. The poem, with all its false starts and endless revisions, still mostly writes itself.
Review, 3872 words
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