Customer Reviews (1)

Not one of Strand's stronger collections.
Mark Strand, The Late Hour (Atheneum, 1978)

I've enjoyed a few of Mark Strand's earlier collections--Darker, especially, was the pride of my poetry collection for a few years-- but I have to admit, this one left me kind of cold. There's something about the writing that feels stilted, antiquated without being consciously so:

"Someone was saying
how the wind dies down but comes back,
how shells are the coffins of wind
but the weather continues.

It was a long night
and someone said something about the moon shedding its white
on the cold field, that there was nothing ahead
but more of the same."
("From the Long Sad Party")

There is very little in that passage that really strikes home, but a lot that doesn't-- the repetition of "wind" in successive lines, the excessively correct diction that reads more like prose than poetry, two rhyming lines in a section of free verse, and a flirtation with, if not kneeling to, cliché. It's synecdochic of the whole book; I could have opened to a random page and found the same. (In fact, like most quotes I pull for poetry reviews, I did get it by opening to a random page.) I'm certainly not going to try and put you off Mark Strand in general, because I like many of his books a great deal, but The Late Hour isn't one of them. **
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Customer Reviews (1)

This is not Mark Strand the poet!
Poetry lovers beware!!! The author of this book is NOT Mark Strand the poet, but one Mark Strand, a fisherman, with a big mustache and lots of fishes on his mind ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Torture
Sometimes when I write a negative review I can find something very good to say about the work, like how it was good, just not to my taste.That is not the case here.

Strand's poetry is pure torture to read.The only upside (I guess I just can't help but find the bright side) is that it's only 48 pages, so while attempting to discover the beauty of our Library of Congress's Poet Laureate, you know it will end soon.

I personally feel that the Geneva Convention must impart into its treatment of prisoners a note that reading Mark Strand's poetry to them, or forcing them to read it themselves, is within the definition of torture.Upon reading the Elegy to his father I feel that an argument can be made that Strand may have read this poem to his father, and it is what had killed him; he bored him to death.

This was the second book of Strand's I have read - the first being The Weather of Words 10 years ago - and I fear that my morbid curiosity may not make it my last. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The best beginning
This book is the best anthology for any beginning poet.It pays homage to poetry's past, while honoring its future.Anyone interested in poetry written just before it bumped against technology and computers will find this a fascinating and necessary book.Great language from a great time in American history. ... Read more

Product Description
Sally Gall is a noted photographer who has always sought the inexplicable in nature, finding beauty in things terrestrial—a beauty defined and enhanced by its opposite: the unsettling, the precipitous, the fearful. Here, in a remarkable series of images taken over a four-year period in Mexico, Belize, Southeast Asia, the U.S., and Europe, she explores a spiritual realm enhanced by the history of early human passage, myth, and spiritual transcendence.

In Subterranea, the objective universe is gone, and only the subjective remains. Eternal time is frozen in a fantastic and otherworldly architecture: crumbling walls, stalactites and stalagmites coated with icy limestone and calcite formations gloaming in the darkness, bleached white as chalk. With each image, Gall draws us deeper into a world forgotten. Somber and mortuary thought seems natural and right in these great spaces—thoughts of Aeneas and Charon the boatman at the mouth of Hades and the shades waiting to be rowed across to the eternal beyond—a recognition that we all come at last to darkness and silence.

Mark Strand, the distinguished poet, essayist, novelist, and former Poet Laureate, also contributes a powerful and evocative essay addressing the emotion of grandeur elicited, the power of silence, the arresting beauty of darkness, and the iconic resonance of Gall's photographs and the underworld they depict. In an afterword, Nan Richardson, editor and writer, explores the mythological resonance that caves evoke throughout time and culture, from Mayan mysteries to the Platonic shadow world. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

moody darkness
Black cover, black endpapers, mostly black dust jacket, and thirty-two mostly dark, moody art photographs of caves, nicely printed on heavy coated paper as, I believe, duotones. I think all the photographs were taken at cave entrances using natural light. The large-format art book includes a "statement" by the author and an essay about caves by Nan Richardson. Many of the photos are better as art than as pictures of caves.--Bill Mixon ... Read more

Product Description
Here are more than a hundred wonderful and sensitive duotone portraits of our major novelists, poets, and playwrights. Paired with the photographs are fascinating texts from each writer on writing—thoughts on the craft, recollections of significant moments from their personal history, meditations on the civic importance of writing, and so forth. Some of these photographs are well known—Bellow, Mailer, Cheever, and Capote—and others have never before been published. Many were taken on location, from Muriel Spark in Tuscany and James Baldwin in Provence to Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Mexico City. All are strikingly fresh and authentic. The pithy and idiosyncratic thoughts on writing are a perfect complement to the superb portraits; often words and pictures seem to exist in a magical rapport. For all of us who care about the American literary scene, Nancy Crampton's gift is an intimate look at our literary heroes, our Writers. 104 duotone photographs. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Not to be Missed
"Writers" is a stunning collection of two-page spreads featuring 104 of our treasured authors, poets and playwrights. The right-hand side of each smooth, heavy page presents Nancy Crampton's arresting photo of a writer -- each photograph communicating far beyond the requisite thousand words.

But then, on each left-hand page, there ARE words: a paragraph or three from the writer about an aspect of their inspiration, their writing philosophy or their life. And tucked in the matter at the back of the book is Nancy's Afterword -- her notes on the backstory of several of the photographs -- which made me flip back through the pages to revisit those images with new insight ... and then all the images, again.

Absolutely lovely!

A Photographer's Glimpse into the Creativity of Writers
A reader's delight, photographer Nancy Crampton has captured the faces (and personalities) of over one hundred of our most prominent writers and poets in this outstanding monograph.Following an introduction of elegant simplicity by Mark Strand, Crampton presents a seamless flow of the artists whose words have filled our eyes and minds, but somehow have eluded our visual images of the creators.While most books by the subjects surveyed include a 'jacket photo', those semblances are usually posed and formal and tell us little about the writer.

Crampton goes 'into the wild' and captures her subjects in studios, out of doors, in public places - any place she finds conducive to the comfort of the subject.These magnificent duotones are not only technically superb as photographic portraits; they convey much of the 'mystery' of the artists.WH Auden is captured in closeup taking a drag on his ubiquitous cigarette; James Baldwin in his white djellaba gazes straight into our eyes from France; Eudora Welty sits graciously in her overstuffed armchair in Jackson, Mississippi; Gabriel Garcia Marquez smiles, eye glasses in hand, in Mexico City; John Cheever sits in solitude but for his dog on the steps in New York; and Susan Sontag, Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Sexton, Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Maurice Sendak, Joseph Brodsky, Lorrie Moore, Tom Stoppard, Chinua Achebe, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Franzen - the list seems endless - all give Crampton their moment of cooperation.

This is a valuable addition to the library of every avid reader.Meet the faces and images of your favorite writers, be challenged by faces you may not know, and enjoy this captured bit of literary history.Very Highly Recommended.Grady Harp, September 05 ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Buy It.
You have the money, you have the time to read (although you probably don't take advantage ofthat time) so why not buy this book.

Mark Strand's Mr and Mrs Baby is one of the best collections of contemporary fiction of ourtime. Stories like "A Dog's Life" and "True Loves" willchallenge the standard conventions which wecling to in our dailylife.

Cutting wit, piercing irony and beautiful writing characterize thismasterpiece. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

editor absent---or absent minded
comparing this edition with australian editions of a similar type-- i was underwhelmed by most of the contributions----a sense of listlessness was my end reaction--the exceptions stand out but how would they fare in a better book??????

and not a word from mark strand----the usa badge of approval as far as poetry goes--not one word except for his first and last name on the cover--is this deliberate or incident?????

certainly it might be interpreted as the editor/poet had left the building-----

Fantastic New Poets
I edit a small poetry journal, so I read a lot of new work. I found this book to be a great sampling of the best that is currently being written/published. To be eligible, a poet could not have published a full-length book. Poems were selected by taking nominations from journals and writing programs, and from poets who entered their own work. These poems were then culled to find the stongest fifty poems. I was delighted to see that many submitted by the poets themselves were selected. My particular favorite (nominated by University of Houston)is "Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?" by Anna Journey. Fantastic.

If you like poetry, don't miss this
BEST NEW POETS 2008 and THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2008 arrived here the same day. I read the latter every year, but surprisingly, the work in BEST NEW POETS 2008 seems superior. Spent a week in pleasure opening this book at random. Too many outstandingly good self-assured poems to name but I laughed out loud at Steve Kistulentz (whose poem's title cannot be reproduced here) and got good chills from Lisa McCullough's "The Boar Roast", a stunning narrative achievement and especially remarkable for a poet prior to her first collection. This book bodes well for American poetry. Thank you Mark Strand, editor, and Jeb Livingood series editor. (check out his bestnewpoets. org) Haven't liked a collection this much from the get-go since Donald Hall's CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY forty years ago. Earlier titles in the series -- 2005, 2006 and 2007 -- are still available and I for one am ordering all three. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
A uniquely appealing collection that reflects the variety and richness of South American poetry.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, a native-born Brazilian, is universally recognized as the finest and most accessible modern Portugese-language poet and, along with Pablo Neruda, a poet of the common man, writing of home, family, friends, and love.

Rafael Alberti--an elegist primarily--came to Argentina (where he wrote many of his poems) in exile from Spain during the Spanish Civil War. The effects of that experience wind through the poet'swork in poems about the survival of the spirit in the face of personal and political tragedy.

Looking for Poetry also contains the simple and haunting poems of the Quechua Indians. ... Read more

Product Description
Reasons for Moving was Mark Strand's first book, and on its publication in 1968 Donald Justice called him "maybe the very best of the new poets." Darker followed, and Robert Penn Warren said, "the moment is always exciting when a true poet finds the secret self that is the wellspring of his inspiration." And Harold Bloom wrote, "these poems instantly touch a universal anguish as no confessional poems can, for Strand has the fortune of writing naturally and almost simply (though this must he supreme artifice) out of the involuntary near solipsism that always marks a central poetic imagination in America."

These key books in the career of a recent Poet Laureate of the United States are now reissued in one volume together with a private-press book of aphorisms dating from the same time. An essential book for a full understanding of one of our major poets.

Color woodcut, Night Scene, by Neil Welliver. Courtesy of the artist. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Profound Poems of the Self
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."

Poet Laureate?
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. ... Read more

Product Description
Word count: 5422. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by Thomson Gale on July 1, 2007. The length of the article is 461 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Mark Strand. Man and Camel.(Book review)
Author: Fred Dings
Publication: World Literature Today (Magazine/Journal)
Date: July 1, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 81Issue: 4Page: 71(1)

Article Type: Book review

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more