If there are two governing images throughout Mark Strand’s poetry, they are the wind and the moon (though the grass and the ocean are honorable mentions). The moon often gazes indifferently upon us, and the wind gusts over grass, between our legs and the trees. Each engenders the nocturnal, the reflection of one’s self and the moon in a pool. These bare environments evoke the nostalgia of Ghibli backgrounds, where you feel a yearning to return to a place you’ve never been. Strand himself seems to occupy the pastoral Prince Edward Island. Landscapes of sprawling tall grass, an expansive sky, and an artful pool of water nestled between green hills. “Black Maps” seems a paradigmatic Mark Strand poem, in this sense. One in which neither "the attendance of stones" nor "the applauding wind" will assure you of your arrival to some truth or established self. These black maps in which we seek meaning describe only their own emptiness, the "bleak, temperate / Necessity of [their] completion." You will not find your house on these maps; "Only you are there / Saying hello / To what you will be, / And the black grass / Is holding up the black stars."

A lot of the poems reside in these black maps, liminal spaces in which we have a vague grasp of ourselves, but the rest is nebulous, drifting. The wind and stones here are anthropomorphized almost ironically. Their attendance and applause, as if you find yourself the subject of a lecture with the indifferent world as audience, nothing to grant your belonging there.

The wind is a force of nature which we often symbolize as a force of change. Its tailwind can press you onward, and its headwind can hold you back. It gusts from places far away and brings with it detritus, disease, cold, heat, and seeds. It’s a force which continues with or without you. Therefore, you can’t look to the wind’s applause for answers to an aimlessness; it will only push you wherever it is headed next, and that direction is indifferent to you. Like the black maps, the wind abides the “bleak, temperate / necessity of its completion,” for it is also “like breath”: inevitable and always moving.

The entire poem resides in darkness, and while we are therefore in the moon’s domain, it is remarkably absent from "Black Maps." The moon is often the lone light gracing the surface of the earth in these poems. Strand loves to note the silvery pallor of moonstruck grass and water, where one is guided by its faint light to reflective ponds.

Admittedly, I experienced a parabolic enjoyment of this collection. I was taken in by the deceptively simple language. Then, for a large swath of the middle, I couldn’t tell whether the language was not deceiving me at all; maybe a lot of these poems were just simple. By the end I ascended in my appreciation again, accepting that sometimes a good poem is a simple poem. I’m not fond of the assertion that poetry died with Eliot and Pound because we no longer treat poems as palimpsests of historical metaphor or maximalist indices. Universality in a poem can be achieved both ways.

Strand’s poetry is like astrology: the recurring symbols can be just about whatever you wish them to be, whatever you impress upon them; however, unlike astrology, these poems are not without narrative, so they aren't just vases for whatever shit you dump in them. They address the fundamental tension of the self, and they wander those interior landscapes where we search for meaning, for cohesion, for syzygy. The wind reminds us of the movement of something bigger than ourselves, and the moon illuminates just enough to ground ourselves in moments of dimlit searching. One of Strand’s final poems discusses explicitly a decades-long fixation on the moon, aptly titled “Nocturne of the Poet Who Loved the Moon”:

I have grown tired of the moon, tired of its look of astonishment, the blue ice of its gaze, its arrivals and departures, of the way it gathers lovers and loners under its invisible wings, failing to distinguish between them. I have grown tired of so much that used to entrance me, tired of watching cloud shadows pass over sunlit grass, of seeing swans glide back and forth across the lake, of peering into the dark, hoping to find an image of a self as yet unborn. Let plainness enter the eye, plainness like the table on which nothing is set, like a table that is not yet even a table.

Respectfully: terrible cover. I don't know what compelled who to choose this Sunday Funnies-ass book cover, but it so grossly misrepresents the tone of this collection that it feels almost ironic.

Collected poems

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Collected poems (2014)

Collected poems (2014)

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