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Barnes & Noble: Hardcover, Paperback

The Beach Hotel

OH, Look, the ship is sailing without us!  And the wind
Is from the east, and the next ship leaves in a year.
Let's go back to the beach hotel where the rain never stops,
Where the garden, green and shadow-filled, says, in the rarest
Of whispers, "Beware and encroachment."  We can stroll, can visit
The dead decked out in their ashen pajamas, and after a tour
Of the birches, can lie on the rumpled bed, watching
The ancient moonlight creep across the floor, The window panes
Will shake, and waves of darkness, cold, uncalled-for, grim,
Will cover us.  And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleep
We'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones,
The dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been
                    Had we not taken his place

Review of the book from Barnes & Noble.

Blizzard of One: Poems
Mark Strand

ABOUT THE BOOK

From The Publisher
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 leave-taking,' 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.

Reviews
|"Oh, look, the ship is sailing without us!" begins "The Beach Hotel," a poem that seems to capture the bizarre excitement at being left behind and abandoned. This sets the appropriately chilly tone for Blizzard of One, and for the romanticized, almostmelodramatic, sense of loss each of these poems have. This is not the first time a poet has romanticized loss. But Strand, a former poet laureate and author of nine books of poems, has the skills needed to get beneath the loss, and find out how it is put together, and how it works. Strand's poems, despite the fact that they are written in free verse, always have a sculpted feeling to them, as if they were carved out of the side of a boulder. You can feel Strand working for each line, for each word. You can feel his enormous restraint. The poems in BLIZZARD OF ONE are terrible and surreal, qualities that have characterized Strand's poems since his early books. The poems are, for the most part, shaped like boxes, and sit mysteriously, like just-darkened windows in the center of each page. A few years back, Strand announced at a lecture at the Art Institute in Chicago that he was going to paint more and write less. He thankfully seems unable to make good on his promise. --Scott Jones

From Entertainment Weekly 
...[L]ines both dreamily elegant and touchingly weird.
 
From Deborah Garrison -- The New York Times Book Review
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.

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