Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

from Sleeping with One Eye Open
Sleeping with One Eye Open
When the Vacation Is Over for Good
Violent Storm
Old People on the Nursing Home Porch
Keeping Things Whole
The Whole Story
The Tunnel

from Reasons for Moving
The Mailman
The Accident
The Man in the Tree
The Man in the Mirror
The Ghost Ship
Moontan
What to Think Of
The Marriage
Eating Poetry
The Dirty Hand

from Darker
The New Poetry Handbook
The Remains
Giving Myself Up
The Room
Letter
Nostalgia
Tomorrow
The Dress
The Good Life
Black Maps
Coming to This
The Sleep
Breath
The Prediction
From a Litany
My Life
My Life by Somebody Else
Courtship
Not Dying
The Way It Is

from The Story of Our Lives
Elegy for My Father
In Celebration
The Story of Our Lives
The Untelling

The Monument

from The Late Hour
The Coming of Light
Another Place
Lines for Winter
My Son
For Jessica, My Daughter
From The Long Sad Party
The Late Hour
The Story
For Her
So You Say
Poor North
Pot Roast
The House in French Village
The Garden
Snowfall

from Selected Poems
Shooting Whales
Nights in Hackett's Cove
A Morning
My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

from The Continuous Life
The Idea
Velocity Meadows
A.M.
Orpheus Alone
Fiction
Luminism
Life in the Valley
The Continuous Life
Always
Se la vita e sventura . . . ?
One Winter Night
The History of Poetry
The Continental College of Beauty
The Midnight Club
The Famous Scene
Itself Now
Reading in Place
The End

from Dark Harbor
I, VII, VIII, XIV, XVI, XX, XXII, XXIII,
XXVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXXI, XXXV,
XXXVI, XXXIX, XL, XLIII, XLIV, XLV

from Blizzard of One
The Beach Hotel
Old Man Leaves Party
IWill Love the Twenty-first Century
The Next Time
The Night, the Porch
Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life
Morning, Noon, and Night
A Piece of the Storm
A Suite of Appearances
Here
Two de Chiricos
Some Last Words
In Memory of Joseph Brodsky
What It Was
The Delirium Waltz
The View

from Man and Camel
The King
I Had Been a Polar Explorer
Man and Camel
Fire
The Rose
Storm
Afterwords
Elevator
Black Sea
Mother and Son
Mirror
Moon
Marsyas
My Name
Poem After the Seven Last Words

About the Author

Mark Strand has received numerous honors and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1990 he was named Poet Laureate of the United States. A longtime resident of Chicago, he now lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

Reviews

Strand's 1980 Selected Poems has probably long had a home on most contemporary poetry readers' shelves. That book proclaimed Strand's status as a major poet writing in a sometimes surreal, humorous, oracular mode: "If a man gives up poetry for power/ he shall have lots of power." This new volume extends that book to encompass the intervening two and a half decades and four collections of poems. From youthful masterpieces like the famous "Keeping Things Whole" ("In a field/ I am the absence/ of field") through the haunting middle work of Darker ("The future is not what it used to be./ The graves are ready. The dead/ shall inherit the dead") up to the self-conscious vignettes of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Blizzard of One ("It was clear when I left the party/ That though I was over eighty I still had/ A beautiful body") and last year's Man and Camel ("The wonder of their singing,/ its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed/ an ideal image for all uncommon couples"), this important book offers the first panoramic view of the ongoing career of a poet who has mattered deeply to poets and readers alike. Strand's is one of the contemporary voices that will not fade. (Sept.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

"The first panoramic view of . . . a poet who has mattered deeply to poets and readers alike. Strand's is one of the contemporary voices that will not fade." -Publishers Weekly

"New Selected Poems is a necessary book . . . Among the best work by any living poet." -Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker