Mark Strand Books

This book presents a small collection of Mr. Strand's images, all titled and dated, and offers a glimpse of the entire span of his career. We are given a sense of his work through four of the major times and places during his life: his photographic apprenticeship in New York during the late 1910's, a sampling of his work done under commission in Mexico, his well known work in New England, and finally, images taken after his emigration to France, in 1950. A brief biography precedes the photographs that follow, and we are left to consider the images free from further didactic comment.

At first sight, one senses immediately the charm this man might have possessed in his relationships with both himself and those people and things surrounding his life. This sense is borne out in the wry humor of "Town Hall", with its off kilter framing, which we instantly recognize as Paul Strand. Ironically, a closer study of his personal life indicates Mr. Strand could be a difficult man. The well-known "Wall Street", an earlier piece of darkly shadowed monstrous windows overpowering passers by, is as close to the foggy pictorialist sense Strand will get, and the rest of the images show him breaking away from that style, and moving head first into the previsualized and almost straight photographic style that he was to help break ground for.

In this collection, several of the photographs stand out; but many seem rather innocuous, specifically the portraits of those he knew personally, and those he didn't - none seem to capture the viewers imagination like those of Mr. Strands' contemporaries might, Edward Weston for one. Instead, they seem unimaginative and emotionless. Furthermore, it doesn't help that, lacking that content, it may be that his reputation as an innovative technician in the darkroom goes unnoticed here, seeing these images only on the page (in small 7 inch by 6 inch reprint).

On the other hand, we are shown some photographs which show how powerful a view of quiet solitude can be. Of particular note,"Tir a'Mhurain" stands alone. A wide view of the silence surrounding three horses watering in the bay, and in the very left foreground, they are being watched from far above by a lone white horse. The leading of the three animals has turned its mane toward, and is eyeing the lone horse. The silvery water of the bay reflects the stand of horses, and more strongly, that of an immense and clouded sky, suggesting a powerful solemnity. Faintly, in mid-ground, wood buildings of a fishing village are left powerless in front of only a small mountain range. Taken in 1954, an American living in France (but not able to speak the language), Mr. Strand might have felt himself the lone horse. The obtrusive sky begging for silence. The artist contemplating his subject from afar.

"Driveway" was taken late in his life (in fact, three years prior to his death) where he lived in France. This poetic view leads us through an overgrowth, tunnel-like, of bare tree limbs and branches. Beneath this dark surrounding of hibernating growth, two parallel white cobblestone paths. Our eyes search the dark, shadowed background to where we are being lead; almost imperceptible, at the end of the driveway, we make out a decrepit structure: a country cottage, seemingly empty and abandoned. One cannot help but feel the author's probable recognition of the path of his own life, and the awful truth of life: of autumn, the oncoming winter, the drawing to a close, and of coming home to a place unknown.

In this collection, these are his strongest images, these landscapes. - whether "Fox River", from his acclaimed book "Time in New England", or the handful of New York cityscapes, or the country landscapes and village life scenes, such as "Marketplace", taken in Italy. Robert Adams has suggested that Mr. Strands work went into decline following his emigration to France in 1950 (1). In actuality, it is these images we wish for more of. Mr. Strand's capacity was not limited by time and place, but by subject and content. Seeing the images borne from his emigrated life, one is left wanting less of his still life's and portraits, and more of what showed a more genuine side of Mr. Strand through symbolic form. Not the modernist machine pictures like "Oil Refinery", or "Akeley Motion Picture Camera", but more of "Landscape, Sicily, Italy", with its bare, white birch trees having cloistered the villager's in their quiet homes.

However, in this book, as a simple compendium of Mr. Strand's oeuvre, the viewer is at least left with a closer understanding of a part of what this celebrated photographer was seeing throughout the varied stages and places, both known and foreign, of his life.

1. Adams, Robert Why People Photograph, Aperture Press, 1994. pg. 85

This collection is a nice, compact, and inexpensive glipse at a range of Paul Strand's photographs from throughout his long 60 year career. I would have prefered the book to be a little larger to allow for bigger pictures. The print quality is decent.

as a person who has been close with the Strand family for a long time, i have to say that out of personal relations and out of knowing the full potential for paul and his family, this book is amazing. you have to remember that there is a face and a mind behind this camera, and the amazing talent that people must have in the first place to even be able to spot beauty in the everyday things. if you can take the time to look at the power of these photographs as a human being with a powerfully capable mind and not as a critic, prone to hang on every little detail instead of fully trying to enjoy the pieces in question, i can garauntee that you will be completely satisfied with this collection. in my mind it will always be stunning.

DARKER and REASONS FOR MOVING each contain many poems which go very deep into the Self. I respectfully submit that, although the poems as a body did not speak to the other reviewer Skag, very, very few of them are "mediocre."

Strand's poetry hits the mark of greatness at times, but at others -- which to my dismay seems the more prevalent -- floats along on mediocrity. Perhaps I'm missing something. I was nevertheless disappointed by this collection.

Mark strand, one of the better living poets in America delivers with a great, longer work set around growing older. It is accessable and interesting, which is about all you can ask for out of a modern volume of poetry. More then a few of these poems will rattle around in your head, long after you have put the book down.

I would actually give this book 4.5 stars if I had the choice, but not 5. The poems are very different and original. All of them had a certain specialness, a deepness, if you will, that made them worth-while to read. My personal favorites are "I once saw a man pursuing the horizon", "A postcard from the volcano", and "Observation Car".

This is a useful little paperback catalogue, it measures eight inches square and is about three sixteenth of an thick (23cm x 23cm x 0.4cm) with the pages unnumbered. It contains about five pages of text: "Welliver's Woods" by Mark Strand which very briefly discusses the artist's subject matter and approach; and "Neil Welliver" by Robert M Douty which discuses a little further the artist and his work. It concludes with a catalogue which provides the basic details, (date, media and size) for each work.

The bulk of the book is taken up with full page colour plates of the artist's work, and as all the paintings represented are square or nearly so they fit very well on the page. The quality of reproduction is good; however in only one picture is the texture of the paint and brushwork evident. In total there are about forty examples of Welliver's paintings reproduced here, plus a photograph of the artist.

I thought when I bought this book that it was a little bit thin to cover writing skills over the course of a year. It is not too thin. It is just right. It provides a years worth of lessons that will improve your child's writing. For a homeschooler this is an easy to follow, well written beginning to writing.

If you are looking for teaching on the mechanics of different forms this book is about fives pages from being a door stop. Don't waste your money.

If all you need are examples of the different forms this is your book.

This book is about writing poetry. It is not about the content of a poem, it is about the formal structure. The authors compile descriptions of seven poetic forms (eight, if you count stanza as a form, as the authors inexplicably do) and three thematic categories. Following each description is a long list of examples of the forms, from the point when each form entered English up to... well, up to...

And that's where we run into the first problem with this book. There are good poets out there writing sonnets and sestinas today, but if the authors are to be believed, formal poetry came to a juddering halt when Robert Frost died. As a reader of poetry, I like Dylan Thomas, Robert Browning, and William Shakespeare, but if a student learning poetry uses this book as the yardstick of where these forms are right now, that student will at best be over forty years out of date.

That's not to suggest that the selections of poems in this book aren't good. They are. Not only do the compilers select the best poets of days gone by, but they select the best examples of the work of those poets. But the selection is slanted in favor of the past. To be really useful a book needs to include both a historical overview of a form and a synoptic look at where poetry lives right now.

Likewise, the selection of forms is brief. I like villanelles and ballads as much as the next guy, but would it really break the editors to dedicate a little more space to ghazals, cinquains, triolets, and haiku? The selection of forms in this book is very introductory, limited to the forms the editors could find in English in profusion. Perhaps somebody fairly new to poetry, who hasn't learned what the forms are and how they work, will find this collection useful. But a poet eager to make the leap beyond mere beginner status will be frustrated with this book.

This book isn't bad. What it does focus on, it focuses on in depth and fairly globally (as much as limiting the selection to English can be global). For beginners, this book may well be a handy introduction to versification. But for those who have been writing for a while, and those who want to move beyond the beginning, there are better books available. Consider, for instance, Miller Williams' Patterns of Poetry: An Encyclopedia of Forms or Barbara Drake's Writing Poetry. Take your time to comparison-shop, ask more experienced poets, and just read. Because you will find books that suit your needs far better than this one.

This was a good introduction to poetic forms, giving clear definitions of villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, etc. As a matter of personal choice, I found some of the poems not particularly apt for the poetic form they were trying to define: why was Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in the "Pastoral" chapter and not the "Ode" chapter? The editors seemed to make arbitrary choices that were sometimes off-kilter. Otherwise, the selection of poems was quite good. As for the complaints about Eurocentrism...let's be honest if not politically correct: nearly all poetic forms in classical poetry were created by Eurocentrist poets. And this book is about classical forms of poetry and how contemporary and modern poets adapted to those forms.

While objections might be appropriate for high-end poets and advanced university students, I have found this book quite helpful at an introductory high school level. It is short and to the point, and does not overly discourage a young student trying to become acquainted with traditional poetic forms.

The examples are archaic, the introductory material weak, the discussion of how to write cursory.

Save your money for STRONG MEASURES by Dacey and Jauss, a much more expensive book, but worth it many times over.

This book was highly recommended to me, but I thought it was pretty low-level, eclectic, impressionistic, juvenile, an over-all dissappointing. If you're looking for something like Aristotle's Poetics, you will be dissappointed too. If you like a patchwork quilt of emotive, faux elitery, then you will find your reflection in this book.

Though Strand has been widely regarded as a notable poet for over thirty years, this book--which comes hot on the heels of his Pulitzer Prize in poetry--is his first collection of essays. Actually, there are other kinds of prose here as well, including two prose poems on the topics of translation and narrative poetry (reprinted from his 1990 book THE CONTINUOUS LIFE) and a story revolving around the conflicts between public life and poetic sensibility. All three are humorous, as are several of the essays: Strand has always oscillated between pure gravitas and a kind of serious humor. Like the best such collections, THE WEATHER OF WORDS not only illuminates Strand's own poetic practice, but also offers insights into poetry that readers unfamiliar with his work will find valuable. An example is his discussion of the villanelle form--how it turns out to be the "safest" kind of poem in which to talk about loss. Particular standouts here are "A Poet's Alphabet," which opens the book, and Strand's introduction to THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1991.

this book is a great picture of poetry by one of america's best living poets. funny, touching, and above all, poetic, strand's new book is definitely worthwhile to anyone interested in poetry.

Very superficial: a good book if you like superficiality.

almost all of the poems in this collection could have been written in "paragraph", or essay form. it seems that the writers of these poems had some sort of passion about the subjects which they chose to write about, and that is good. but i was constantly annoyed that they decided to write about their thoughts in the form of a poem. It seemed that this genre of writing simply stunted their passions and ideas - as if they were more concerned about construing their thoughts in the poem format, and yet didn't quite know how to do that. the result is a collection of stifled works that do not read particularly well as poems, and yet seem to cry out for the full freedom of exspression that an essay would have allowed. NOT EVERYONE IS A POET - AND THAT IS OKAY. GOT IT ? i believe that a poem is a brilliant arrangement of words about a writers ideas that serve to inspire and immerse the reader in the passion of the thoughts via this - again - "brilliant arrangement of words " , in the style we call the poem. *** another comment i have about this book is the general theme that mark strand seems to have chosen when considering what works to allow in this book -his personal selection of what he considers the " great poems of the twentieth century". the common thread linking most of the poems collected in this volume is in fact the subject of regret that the poets all seem to have about ....who knows what. most of them ramble remorsefully about nothing imparticular - and in, again, a very amateurish "poetry" style . i think that a poem should contain some form of enlightenment, and should be written cleverly enough to get the reader to enjoy the work; feel inspired, somehow. very few poems in this collection meet the criteria . i note that one of the reviewers on this page has copied some lines from a few of the poems in the book that were about something concrete that had actually happened to the poem writers, and had impacted them enough to compell them to write of it. however, again, it is safe to say that practically all of the other ninety-nine works in this book are meandering , dissconnected, and incomplete thoughts that these "poets" have clearly tried in vain to squeeze into the "poem" outfit. someone should tell them that they would learn more - and be able to share more with their readers - if they would simply write out their thoughts as essays. i think that there are few poets in the world, and in my opinion this collection does not contain the works of hardly a one of them. i must say, also, that the reviewer who quotes from some of the poems in this book in her review really had to dig - trust me - to come up with even a few tatters of worthwhile reading from the material offered. oh well, maybe her review got this book some readers .

Poet Laureate Mark Strand has selected well-known voices, as well as the more obscure poets, "a carefully chosen sampler juxtaposing long and short form, experimental and traditional style, expected and surprising choices." These are the voices of the 2oth century, an international collection, half from outside of the United States, some translated from other languages, a mix of humor and drama, designed for those who love poetry and those who are just discovering the beauty of this form. A distinction: these are not the hundred great poems of the century, but a hundred poems, surely enough to whet any appetite, a kaleidoscope of images as viewed by individuals, representing North and South America and Europe, the North American poets limited to those born after 1927.

The voice of war rings loud, the memory of loss still fresh and wounding, the world scarred by conflict, the horrors endured:

"Up there in the Aleutians
they are knocking the gold
teeth out of the dead Japanese"

and...

"You know by now there
isn't much to live for
except to spite Hitler-
The war is so lurid
that everything else is dull."
(Ruth Stone, "That Winter")

For those who live day to day in managed care, white-sheathed nurses watching, evening brings quiet, one more passing of a burdened day:

"It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bone needles
of the games of anagram and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask."
(Louise Bogan, "Evening in the Sanitarium")


There are musings of death, choices made and wisdom gleaned in flashes, images that strike like lightning, illuminating:

"I am bound by my own thirty-year-old
decision: who drinks the wine
Should take the dregs; even in the bitter lees and sediment
New discovery may lie. The deer in that beautiful place lay down
their bones: I must wear mine."
(Robinson Jeffers, "The Deer Lay Down Their Bones")

Richard Wright's "I Have Seen Black Hands" calls a nation to acknowledge the struggle, the great anguish of bent backs, hard work and irreconcilable loss:

"And the black hands strained and clawed and struggled in vain at
the noose that tightened about the black throat,
And the black hands waved and beat fearfully at the tall flames that
cooked and charred the black flesh...

And some day- and it is only this which sustains me-
Someday there shall be millions and millions of them,
On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!"

Through the passage of the century, memories cling, fragments of the past, forgotten until discovered in the bottom of a drawer, or glimpsed in a photograph:

"No it was not because it was too far
you failed to visit me that day or night.
From year to year it grows in us until it takes hold
I understood it as you did: indifference."
(Czeslaw Milosz, "Elegy for N.N.")

Here are the words of Carlos Drummond de Andrade, W.H. Auden, Jorge Luis Borges, Hart Crane, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Michaux, Ranier Maria Rilke, Theodore Roethke and Dylan Thomas, to name a few. With biographies and index, this volume reflects a century, events that changed the face of the globe, coexisting with intimate moments and small solitudes, all fragments of the whole, food for the soul, carefully selected, one hundred voices ringing. Luan Gaines/2005.

As Strand states in this introduction, this book presents a 100 great poems of the 20th century, not the 100 great poems of the 20th century. The selection naturally reflects Strand's personal but excellent taste. He has caste a wide net, including poets from several European countries, Latin America, Turkey, and Israel, as well as a generous selection of American poets. Some very famous poems are presented but also some less known but worthy poems by famous poets. Strand has also tried to balance the nature of the poems, including both humourous and serious works, hence the inclusion of a poem by Ogden Nash and a relatively lighthearted poem by the Spanish poet Alberti. Some readers may be disappointed by the exclusion of some of their favorite poems. I, for example, would have chosen different poems by William Carlos Williams, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, but Strand has certainly chosen well. Perhaps because Strand is himself an accomplished poet, I think some poems have been selected on the basis of what might be called technical merit, demonstrations of how to achieve a variety of effects via poetic efforts.
The best part of this anthology, like all good anthologies, is encountering important but unfamiliar works. This anthology features a number of powerful works probably unknown to most of the reading public in this country. Reading Thom Gunn's Lament or the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet's Things I Didn't Know I Loved is worth the price of the book.

As a Secondary English teacher, I feel this book would be a wonderful teaching tool for homeschoolers or public school teachers. Explanations are clear and examples are ample. Although this is excellent for younger grades, it is also an great review or introduction to literature for older students as well. Literary terms, such as setting, mood, clarity, character development, ..., are well-explained and any student would be well-equipped to discuss and analyze literature with these tools. In fact, I think that high school students who wish to take the CLEP in Analyzing and Interpreting Literature would benefit from using this book before the test, especially studying the literary devices explained in the book.

I ordered this book through our charter school because I had read several glowing reviews of it on homeschool sites and Amazon. I thought it would provide a little more guidance on what type of analysis would be appropriate at different grade levels. I had planned to let my child select books he wanted to read and then use this book as a guide for discussing and writing about what he had read.

Unfortunately, This book reminds me of why I disliked college English classes. It manages to suck the life out of even "The Jumping Frog of Calveras County". It outlines the Socratic method, gives some contrived "scripts" of what this method would sound like, and defines basic terms for literary analysis. The author's view that there are no right/wrong answers to anything pervades the entire book. A discussion between a "teacher" and "student" about Red Riding Hood brings up points like "It is a bad story because it makes women look stupid"...Did a real child come up with that?

I would have liked some discussion of how to guide teacher/student discussions. It wasn't clear if we are supposed to be skilled enough to somehow steer our politically correct little pupils to discuss conflict, theme, character, etc or just hope it comes up in amongst all the discussion of how fairy tales violate the ideals of feminism.

I did like the lists of books for different grade levels in the back of the book. Still, this book really isn't much more than an overgrown English 101 hand-out.