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Mark Strand is one of a trio of connected American poets
who seem to sometimes inhabit the same poetic space: Charles Wright, Charles
Simic and Mark Strand certainly knew each other and have occasionally written
to and about themselves as friends and fellow writers.
Of the three, and I have many books by each of them on my shelves, my
favourite has always been Charles Wright, but for a while Mark Strand's Selected
Poems (Carcanet, 1995; not the earlier
USA Selected) was a book that I carried around in my bag and re-read
constantly for several months. I use the first poem in that collection,
'Sleeping With One Eye Open' with students as an interesting example of near-
and in-your-face rhyme, 'Eating Poetry' as an example of poetry about poetry,
and 'The Prediction' as an example of a poem within a poem, and also its
first and last lines as a workshop exercise to write between.
But it is the more mysterious poems that I love: 'From a Litany', 'My Life by
Someone Else' and the 'Elegy for My Father' sequence, along with the book
length poem Dark Harbour, and
especially this, the poem at which my Selected Poems falls open:
A Morning
I have carried it with me each day: that morning I took
my uncle's boat from the
brown water cove
and headed for Mosher
Island.
Small waves splashed
against the hull
and the hollow creak of
oarlock and oar
rose into the woods of
black pine crusted with lichen.
I moved like a dark star,
drifting over the drowned
other half of the world
until, by a distant prompting,
I looked over the gunwale and saw beneath the surface
a luminous room, a
light-filled grave, saw for the first time
the one clear place given
to us when we are alone.
I'm not alone in loving this poem, and although I wouldn't go along
with it (or any other poem) being 'lifesaving' there's a lucid, personal
exposition of the poem over at Anthony
Wilson's blog.
I remain unsure if this is a poem about death, about realising we
all die, which the mention of 'a
light-filled grave' suggests, or just (perhaps also?) a poem about that
elation of being along out on the ocean watching the interaction of light
and water. Either way, it's a magical short poem, as are many of the others
in
the Selected volume, although I
confess I haven't quite recovered all of my previous enthusiasm rereading
the book after hearing the news Strand had died last weekend.
What I do know is for a while he was an important author for me, someone who
bridged the lyrical and experimental, explored notions of faith, doubt and
grace through ideas of the secular other, and offered carefully refined and
structured poems to his readers. Recent volumes have in the main felt
lightweight and thin, but his Selected Poems along with Dark Harbour remain outstanding achievements.
I haven't much else to say, just wanted to mark the passing of another
important poet who has slipped away into the darkness. If you don't know his
work, take a look. If you do have a re-read. Here's another Mark Strand poem
I thought appropriate:
The End
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the
ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the
sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for
once it is clear that he'll never go back.
When the time has passed
to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching
the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not
every man knows what he'll discover instead.
When the weight of the
past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than
remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a
close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what
is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on
slips into darkness, there at the end.
© Rupert
Loydell 2014
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