Borzoi Reader | Authors


		Mark Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was raised and educated in the United States. He has written nine books of poems, which have brought him many honors and grants, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Blizzard of One. He was chosen as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1990. He is also the author of a book of stories, Mr. and Mrs. Baby, several volumes of translations (works by Raphael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others), the editor of a number of anthologies, and the author of two monographs on contemporary artists (William Bailey and Edward Hopper). He teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.


		Blizzard of One won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999. 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. 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. photo: (c) Emily Mott


		A brilliant and witty collection of writings on the art and nature of poetry -- a master class both entertaining and provocative. The pieces have a broad range and many levels. In one, we sit with the teenage Mark Strand while he reads for the first time a poem that truly amazes him: "You, Andrew Marvell" by Archibald MacLeish, in which night sweeps in an unstoppable but exhilarating circle around the earth toward the speaker standing at noon. The essay goes on to explicate the poem, but it also evokes, through its form and content, the poem's meaning -- time's circular passage -- with the young Strand first happening upon the poem, the older Strand seeing into it differently, but still amazed. Among the other subjects Strand explores: the relationship between photographs and poems, the eternal nature of the lyric, the contemporary use of old forms, four American views of Parnassus, and an alphabet of poetic influences. We visit as well Strandian parallel universes, whose absurdity illuminates the lack of a vital discussion of poetry in our culture at large: Borges drops in on a man taking a bath, perches on the edge of the tub, and discusses translation; a president explains in his farewell address why he reads Chekhov to his cabinet. Throughout The Weather of Words, Mark Strand explores the crucial job of poets and their readers, who together joyfully attempt the impossible -- to understand through language that which lies beyond words.