178 Western American Literature The Continuous Life. By Mark Strand. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. 63 pages, $18.95.) New and Selected Poems. By Mark Strand. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. 152 pages, $10.95.) Years ago, as a fledgling poet, I stumbled on a horrifying, nearly over whelming fact: that there were thoughts, visions, happenings for which I, as poet, had no words. I was so frustrated by this that I mentioned it to a musi cian friend, asking if he had experienced something similar with music. He looked at me sadly and lifted his hands in despair. “All the time,” was his answer. Thus my introduction to the tragedy that must be dealt with by all artists, a tragedy to which Mark Strand, Poet Laureate of the United States, Pro fessorof English at the University of Utah, author of seven books of poetry and numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, iscertainly no stranger. With the publication of his new collection, The Continuous Life and the reissue of New and Selected Poems, the reader has a comprehensive view of Strand’s growth—as a poet and as a human in the twentieth century—and of his solutions to the problems inherent in both. In his book, Mark Strand and the Poet’s Place in Contemporary Culture, David Kirby makes the point that the early Strand, in his attempt to “recreate the poem” and bring it under the control of language began by “jettisoning himself.” An in-depth reading of New and Selected Poems shows that this is not quite true. Strand, the poet, the questioner, the wrestler with the invisible, even as a young man could write in “Keeping Things Whole,” “In a field / I am the absence of field ■■. / Wherever I am I am what is missing . . . / We all have reasons / for moving. I move / To keep things whole.” This is certainly not removal of self but the poet as anintegral, almost god-like part of the universe, attempting to write the mystical, the unsayable from the inside out, battling with a world that may (ormay not, always Strand’s stance) exist except in the experience of the seer. This is the poet who could write in the poem “The New Poetry Hand book,” a series of aphorisms ending with number 21: “If a man finishes a poem, / He shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion / And be kissed by white paper.” Again, not denial of existence of self but the tragedy of the attempt to write something that turns to nothing simply through the fact of its imprison ment in language. Language is the poet’s only tool, all that he has, and it is language—and all the poetic techniques from simile and metaphor to rhythms and startling portrayals of the ordinary turned surreal—that Strand manipulates, turning and twisting, viewing from all points in his desire for the truth. Moving from The Selected Works to The Continuous Life gives the dili gent reader remarkable insight into the art of writing poetry, a favorite theme Reviews 179 of Strand’s. Here, too, we see the mature poet pushing language to its limits, bending sentences and stanzas to his will. These are formidable poems, clear and precise, and they demand close attention. “Orpheus Alone,” perhaps the finest poem in the book and, to my mind, one of Strand’s finest poems to date, gives us Orpheus—poet, singer, lover— mourning his loss, “Taking off to wander the hills / Outside of town, where he stayed until he had shaken / The image of love and put in its place the world / As he wished it would be, urging its shape and measure / Into speech of such newness that the world was swayed . . .” and, “The voice of light / Had come forth from the body of fire, and each thing / Rose from its depths and shone as it never had. / And that was the second great poem, / Which no one recalls anymore. The third and greatest / Came into the world as the world, out of the unsayable / Invisible source of all longing to be / It came in a language / Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and...
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Apr 1, 1996
Charles Berger 
