Reasons for Moving was Mark Strand's first book, and on its publication in 1968 Donald Justice called him "maybe the very best of the new poets." Darker followed, and Robert Penn Warren said, "the moment is always exciting when a true poet finds the secret self that is the wellspring of his inspiration." And Harold Bloom wrote, "these poems instantly touch a universal anguish as no confessional poems can, for Strand has the fortune of writing naturally and almost simply (though this must he supreme artifice) out of the involuntary near solipsism that always marks a central poetic imagination in America." These key books in the career of a recent Poet Laureate of the United States are now reissued in one volume together with a private-press book of aphorisms dating from the same time. An essential book for a full understanding of one of our major poets. Color woodcut, Night Scene, by Neil Welliver. Courtesy of the artist.
Author
Mark Strand was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. He was a professor of English at Columbia University and also taught at numerous other colleges and universities. Strand also wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies and translated Spanish poet Rafael Alberti. He is survived by a son, a daughter and a sister.
