Blizzard of One: Poems, by Mark Strand

Alfred A. Knopf, 64 pages, $21

Mark Strand has for some years enjoyed the singular advantage of being the most imitated poet in America; even for those younger poets who have gone on to find quite distinctive voices of their own, it can prove difficult to shake off the influence of the flawless liquidity of Strand's lines. A former poet laureate and a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award, he has found success in every quarter. But the acclaim that washes over him has had the unfortunate effect of obscuring his development and evolution; his work is loved and appreciated but not always well understood.

In his earlier work, certainly up through the Selected Poems of 1980, Strand made a beautiful kind of poetry out of surrealism, flavored with the spice of the Latin American poets he had read and translated. He was a melodious trickster with a perfect poker face; it was always difficult to know when our laughter was permitted. Now Strand, in his middle 60s, has begun to contemplate the end:

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into. . . .

-- "The Night, the Porch"

He is never solemn, but elegy has taken over from standup. He has become our literature's sad clown -- if only in the recherché sense of Picasso's harlequins or Wallace Stevens's "Comedian as the Letter C." Strand has never been a remotely confessional or self-unburdening poet, and this habit has not changed, but the elated moments of "The College of Beauty" or "The Eater of Poetry" are gone. In their place are the losses and subdued feelings of "Untitled" --

. . . learning too late that something is always
About to happen just at the moment it serves no purpose at all . . .

-- or "Morning, Noon, and Night," which speaks of the

drowned swimmer whose imagination has outlived his fate, and who swims
To prove, to no one in particular, how false his life had been.

Even the high-spirited waggishness of "Five Dogs" concludes:

No one was home. The phone kept ringing. The curtains
Of sleep were about to be drawn, and darkness would pass
Into the world. And so, and so . . . goodbye all, goodbye dog.

The influences of Donald Justice (who was an early teacher of Strand's) and, most especially, Wallace Stevens are now emergent. More than ever, Strand uses Justice's twilight mood, and the musicality of Stevens, which was always a part of Strand's work, informs his poems ever more deeply. Strand even invokes Stevens's poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" in "The Great Poet Returns," which describes a poet's return from the dead to give a reading:

. . . Then he was gone,
And the world was a blank. It was cold and the air was still.

Sorrow subtends all these poems, but there are many beauties here to equal Strand's greatest earlier work. None is more beautiful than "A Piece of the Storm," from which the title of the volume is drawn. A snowflake -- the "blizzard of one" -- falls and disappears, "a time between times, a flowerless funeral," leaving behind only the possibility of a kind of transcendence. Mutability and dense darkness held back by a snowflake -- this is the controlling idea of the mature and brilliantly accomplished Mark Strand.