Reasons for Moving
by Mark Strand
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This second book of Mark Strand's poetry has his spare, resonant free verse. He is philosophical and elegant, but only a few poems in this book really get my blood moving. One of these is the much-anthologized "Keeping Things Whole," which gives a physical description of movement and lends a line to the book as a title. Another example is "The Babies," a terror of growing up in a post-industrial society:
We must move faster.
The babies have grown into their suits.
They march all day in the sun without blinking.
Their leader sits in a bullet-proof car and applauds.
Smoke issues from his helmet.
Contents:
Eating Poetry, The Accident, The Mailman, The Man in the Tree, The Ghost Ship, The Kite, The Marriage, The Whole Story, The Babies, The Last show more Bus, What to Think Of, The Dirty Hand, The Tunnel, Moontan, The Dream, The Man in Black, Violent Storm, The Suicide, Keeping Things Whole, The Door, The Dead, The Man in the Mirror show less
We must move faster.
The babies have grown into their suits.
They march all day in the sun without blinking.
Their leader sits in a bullet-proof car and applauds.
Smoke issues from his helmet.
Contents:
Eating Poetry, The Accident, The Mailman, The Man in the Tree, The Ghost Ship, The Kite, The Marriage, The Whole Story, The Babies, The Last show more Bus, What to Think Of, The Dirty Hand, The Tunnel, Moontan, The Dream, The Man in Black, Violent Storm, The Suicide, Keeping Things Whole, The Door, The Dead, The Man in the Mirror show less
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ThingScore 50
Mr. Strand's best poems are written when he is somewhat debonair: care, when it comes, comes too heavily. I am not sure that his style can bear the weight of this sad time.
added by jburlinson
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Author Information
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Mark Strand was born on April 11, 1934 in Summerside on Prince Edward Island in Canada. Since his father's job resulted in many transfers, he spent his childhood in Cleveland, Halifax, Montreal, New York and Philadelphia and his teenage years in Colombia, Mexico and Peru. He received a bachelor's degree at Antioch College in Ohio in 1957, a show more bachelor of fine arts in painting from Yale University School of Art and Architecture in 1959, and a master of fine arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1962. He studied 19th-century Italian poetry in Florence on a Fulbright Grant from 1960-1961. His first poetry collection, Sleeping with One Eye Open, was published in 1964. His other works included Reasons for Moving, Darker, The Story of Our Lives, The Late Hour, A Continuous Life, Dark Harbor, and Collected Poems: Mark Strand. In 1990, he was named the fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. He received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1993 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for Blizzard of One. In 1980, he felt that he had reached an impasse and stopped writing poetry for several years. During that time, he wrote several children's books including The Planet of Lost Things and Mr. and Mrs. Baby. He also wrote books on the painters EdwardHopper and William Bailey, and a collection of critical essays entitled The Art of the Real. He died of liposarcoma on November 29, 2014 at the age of 80. (Bowker Author Biography) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and was raised and educated in the United States and South America. He is the author of a book of stories, "Mr. and Mrs. Baby", several volumes of translations (Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade among them), a number of anthologies (most recently "The Golden Ecco Anthology") and several monographs on contemporary artists (William Bailey and Edward Hopper). He has received many honors and grants for his poems, including a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 1990 he was chosen as Poet Laureate of the United States. He teaches in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. (Publisher Provided) Mark Strand's collection "Blizzard of One" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. (Publisher Provided) show less
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